ABSTRACT
This chapter explores key legal mechanisms the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) uses to push innovations and meet its goals while growing a commercial industry that can thrive on its own. It explains the key methods, their differences, and how the use of each garners results for the US commercial space programme. It also shows how NASA uses its various tools to push commercial providers to create technologies that have a marketplace whereby NASA may be only one of many customers – rather than the old paradigm of contractors developing systems only for Government use.
