Google is taking over the lease at the airfield that houses Hangar One -- the giant eight-acre aircraft hangar that was built in 1933 to house massive dirigibles and now is one of the most recognizable landmarks in Silicon Valley.
On Monday, NASA said that Google subsidiary Planetary Ventures LLC had been selected to take over the blimp hangar -- a highly visible icon on Silicon Valley's Highway 101 -- and operate the Moffett Federal Airfield that is already home to the fleet of private jets owns by Google's executives.
The deal is still being negotiated, but if it gets finalized, it could lead to a better lease for the fleet of private jets. And it helps NASA earn some cash for a property that it let languish for the past 20 years. But more than that, it underscores the increasingly tight relationship between Google and the space agency research center, located just three miles from Google's headquarters. Google has already leased more than 40 acres of NASA Ames space to build a 1.2-million-square-foot R&D facility, and the company is working with NASA to test the world's first quantum computer at Ames too.
The relationship is a nice metaphor for the way commercial web companies like Google have moved into the R&D domain that was traditionally home to government operations like NASA. And not everyone likes this metaphor. The Google-NASA pacts came under scrutiny this fall, as news reports accused Google executives of abusing their Ames relationship in order to cheaply operate their fleet of private jets at taxpayer expense.
A new lease with Ames gives Google access to three new hangars and 90,000 square feet of NASA buildings. Depending on how the deal is structured, it could also mitigate some of that criticism. To date, Google executives had supposedly been supporting NASA's science mission with its private jets but an investigation by a local TV station found that only 155 of the more-than-1,000 flights they studied were actually used for science. The jets are operated by an independent company, called H211 LLC, which had also been bidding on the Moffet Field lease, according to Deborah Feng, NASA's Associate Center Director, Mission Support.
NASA took over Hangar One in 1994, but it's been a thorn in the space agency's side. In 1997, NASA discovered toxic PCBs in the hangar, and it has been mothballed and off-limits to humans ever since. As part of the lease agreement, Google will not only fix up Hangar One, but it will also rehabilitate two other Moffett Field hangars, build an on-site educational facility, and even upgrade NASA's golf course.
The lease "will allow NASA to focus its resources on core missions, while protecting the federal need to use Moffett Field as a continued, limited-use airfield," NASA said in a press release. News of the lease was first reported by the website NASA Watch.
"We are delighted to move ahead in the selection process and we look forward to working with both GSA and NASA to preserve the heritage of Moffett Federal Airfield," Google said in an emailed statement.
1Update 10:30 EST 02/10/14: This story has been updated to make it clear that the jets in question are owned by Google executives and not Google itself.
