New Caltech research ‘Hub’ seeks discovery, with some help from industry and government

Caltech on Thursday, March 21, announced the opening of the Brinson Exploration Hub, a new center on campus that leaders say will revolutionize how certain research is executed at the institution.

The Hub will foster partnerships between academia, government and industry to accelerate the pace of innovation and discovery. By taking on a more risk-tolerant, fast-paced approach to ambitious research projects, the Hub’s founders and leaders hope to open up new avenues for research that will benefit both humankind and scientific understanding.

“We want to reimagine how we do missions in the future, and this means working with commercial partners to advance the pace and lower the cost of scientific discoveries,” explained Mark Simons, John W. and Herberta M. Miles Professor of Geophysics, former chief scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the Hub’s inaugural director.

“The Brinson Hub is not just about building missions but figuring out how to best go about this at a faster cadence and an acceptable tolerance of risk,” Simons said.

The Hub was founded on a $100 million donation from the Brinson Foundation, a philanthropic organization dedicated to supporting initiatives in education and science that produce societal benefits.

The Foundation’s founder and board chairman, Gary P. Brinson, hopes that the Hub will provide scientists with the freedom to pursue research that benefits society.

“We’re trying to supply the scientists with a $100 million dollar blank canvas if you will, let them paint that canvas with their expertise and hopefully the benefits will flow from that exploration activity,” Brinson explained.

The Hub will be run by members of Caltech’s campus and JPL. Researchers from both institutions can submit proposals for projects they believe could benefit from the Hub’s approach. Members of the Hub will determine which proposals to accept based on a set of guidelines.

According to Simons, the guidelines include that projects involve collaboration between campus and JPL, include contributions from students, advance basic science and provide some benefit to society or demonstrate a path toward that goal.

Simons explained that these projects could range from launching instruments on balloons, taking ships to Antarctica to deploy tech below the ice or “launching things in space, either around the earth or even beyond to the moon or to an asteroid.”

Simons hopes the Hub will provide a number of benefits to researchers and students on Caltech’s campus. By adopting a higher tolerance for risk, such as utilizing newer or cheaper technologies, projects at the Hub can go from design to deployment in a much shorter timeframe.

The Hub will also provide Caltech students and postdocs with the opportunity to learn how large-scale projects are done at government and private institutions.

JPL Director Laurie Leshin outlined some of the benefits JPL will receive in this partnership in addition to the outcomes of the research itself.

“For us at JPL, we’re going to be working kind of outside some of our usual constraints and I think that is a great opportunity for innovation in how we do space missions,” Leshin explained. “And my hope is to bring the innovations from the Hub back to our NASA missions to help us continue to drive the forefront of space exploration.”

Leshin also noted that the Hub could build a pipeline of “brilliant students” who might join JPL after graduating.

“We’re always looking for the very best students to come and be our future employees,” Leshin said.

The opening of the Hub comes at a time when private industry is taking an increasingly large role in space operations. In late February, Intuitive Machines, a publicly traded company, successfully delivered their lunar lander to the Moon’s surface making them the first commercial company to do so. According to a brief by the U.S. International Trade Commission, SpaceX, often cited as a model for innovation in the private space economy, accounted for 78% of space launches in the U.S. in 2022. SpaceX is notorious for testing rockets that blow up and using the opportunity to learn from their mistakes.

This philosophy of taking risks and learning from failure will be a motivating factor at the Brinson Exploration Hub.

“When you look at the launch companies, you know, they try, things don’t work, they try again, things don’t work, they try and suddenly they changed how people do business,” Simons illustrated.

Rather than perfecting technology in the lab before launching it into space, both Leshin and Simons see value in learning from the launch.

“This is a way for us to try things quickly,” Leshin described. “And so, to me, that’s what I’m most excited about is how can we actually use space as our laboratory, right? Get up there and try things as fast as we can.”

The Hub presents Caltech with an entirely new way to pursue research, so new that no one quite knows what the first projects will look like. In 18 months, Simons said, there will be a clearer picture of how the Hub operates.

“This is an experiment, right? We haven’t done this yet,” Simons said with enthusiastic laughter.