NASA Hosts Unveiling of Plans for New Silicon Valley Innovation Hub

NASA’s Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley today hosted an announcement by the University of California Berkeley and San Francisco-based developer SKS Partners of a proposed new campus and innovation hub for research and advancements in astronautics, aeronautics, quantum computing, climate studies, social sciences, and more. The new campus, called Berkeley Space Center, aims to offer lab, office, and educational spaces along with student and faculty housing, a conference center, and retail space on 36 acres within the NASA Research Park (NRP) at Ames.

Berkeley Space Center follows on a NASA-UC Berkeley partnership created to explore potential mutually beneficial learning opportunities, including accelerating local and national capabilities for transporting cargo and passengers using emerging automation and electric propulsion technologies; examining how biomanufacturing can enable deep space exploration; and leveraging NASA’s high-performance computing assets. The new campus aims to bring together researchers from the private sector, academia, and the government to tackle the complex scientific, technological, and societal issues facing our world.

“The diverse portfolios of NASA Ames and Berkeley open potential future collaborations in a variety of areas including interplanetary exploration, air transportation capabilities, the search for life beyond our planet, and environmental studies for the benefit of all,” said Eugene Tu, Ames center director.

NASA Research Park is a world-class research and development hub for government, academia, non-profits, and industry, located at Ames in Moffett Field, California. Ames has a long history of partnering with diverse entities – from space technology start-ups to the Federal Aviation Administration – to combine strengths to tackle great challenges. Through the Berkeley Space Center, UC Berkeley joins Carnegie Mellon as the second major university to choose NASA Research Park for a new campus.

“The Berkeley Space Center will bring together leading experts in academia, government, and industry to enable new collaboration in aerospace, bioengineering, advanced air mobility, and other areas of research,” said U.S. Rep. Anna G. Eshoo. “Bravo to NASA Ames and UC Berkeley on this watershed moment in the transformation of Moffett Field into an innovation hub and a model for bringing together the brightest minds in academia and government.”

The United States Geological Survey serves as another model partnership at Ames, with development of a new campus collocating at NASA Research Park to support joint research in lunar prospecting, earthquake simulations, ecology, remote sensing work, and more.

Learn more about Ames’ world-class research and development in aeronautics, science, and exploration technology at: https://www.nasa.gov/ames

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Members of the news media interested in covering this topic should reach out to the Ames newsroom.