Apollo Program's patent revenue

[stpauler]

I was asked a question that I thought I’d pawn off on the teeming millions:

“Any information on the patent revenues from the Apollo program? I have heard that they were 10 times the cost of the program, but this is probably an urban legend as well.”

Anyone know?

[Duckster]

NASA operates its own spinoff web site “featuring successfully commercialized NASA technology.”

You can run the database and see what comes up with respect to Apollo. I ran a simple search and got 40 hits.

There is also an Apollo contributions web page detailing some specific spinoffs. Quite an impressive list.

[stpauler]

Thanks Duckster.

I did find out the following basic info so far. The Apollo program was cancelled earlier than expected (The last Apollo mission was 17, although the schedule was originally for 18-20 as well. The budget was cut for NASA to fund the Vietnam War). The total spending for the Apollo program (1961-1973) was $25 billion.
Patents ran for 17 years (until June 8th, 1995 after that, patents are at 20 years). So all of the patents expired in 1990 at the very latest.

The next question would be, where to find out how much revenue was generated from the patents that were issued to NASA.

[CurtC]

From the January 22, 1993 edition of the What’s New newsletter, Bob Park explains:

REPORT ACKNOWLEDGES THAT NASA SPINOFF CLAIMS WERE EXAGGERATED!
“To much of the public,” a NASA report admits, “NASA’s technology transfer reputation is based on some famous examples, including Velcro, Tang and Teflon. Contrary to popular belief, NASA created none of these.” NASA merely publicized them. The study concluded that “there have not been very many technology transfer successes compared to the potential.” This rare outbreak of candor was applauded by NASA Administrator Daniel Goldin, who called for the study. In 1991, during a Senate debate on an amendment to slash funding for Space Station Freedom, Sen. Heflin (D-AL) produced a NASA list of 74 “space spinoffs”–everything from synthetic teats for piglets to portable ice rinks. WHAT’S NEW challenged anyone to document that a single item on the list actually owed its existence to the space program (7/19/91). There were no takers.

[Hail_Ants]

The Apollo program was cancelled earlier than expected (The last Apollo mission was 17, although the schedule was originally for 18-20 as well. The budget was cut for NASA to fund the Vietnam War). The total spending for the Apollo program (1961-1973) was $25 billion.

[hijack]
What’s really frustrating about this, is this (from Encyclopedia Astronautica):

**Total savings of cancelling the two missions (since the hardware was already built and the NASA staff had to stay in place for the Skylab program) was only $42 million. **

So we could have had 50% more landings for a mere extra .2% of the whole budget.
[/hijack]