Economic impact? They have it down to a science

At the frontiers of shock physics, the tools can be as blunt as a four-inch projectile fired down a 40-foot cannon, or as elegant as a split laser beam. Either can create tremendous pressures, pressures that can alter materials in ways important to the nation’s security, or its economic leadership.

Experiments might take weeks to set up, a millisecond to complete, and weeks to analyze.

The compact pulse power facility that technicians were calibrating Wednesday can cost $1.5 million.

Yogendra “Yogi” Gupta, director of the Institute for Shock Physics at Washington State University, wants to make that pulser, or another like it, a key asset of an Applied Science Laboratory in Spokane. Although the lab already exists thanks to funding from the institute and the Office of Naval Research, Gupta says operations will be short-lived unless he and a group of local supporters can raise a $15 million endowment.

That’s a lot of money in Spokane, where so many infrastructure and human resource needs go unmet. The community has a relatively small group of donors to draw from, and many are also being approached about supporting new medical research efforts.

Although the Spokane area has many companies that work with materials from aluminum to polymers, the health care industry towers over all others. The city has no more powerful magnet when it comes to research funding. Gupta thinks the economy should be more multi-polar.

“I’m just trying to balance the portfolio,” he says.

The type of laboratory Gupta envisions for Spokane would be unique anywhere, but especially so in a city without a major research university like WSU or the University of Washington.

“How do you describe something people haven’t seen?” he asks.

The Pullman-based institute and Spokane ASL would have completely different missions. The institute does fundamental research that produces new knowledge without regard to its economic value. The laboratory would take that science, as well as that developed elsewhere, and apply it to real-world problems submitted by government agencies and private companies.

“It is guided by ‘Where’s the customer,’ ” he says. In part, that explains why the lab is in Spokane, rather than Pullman. If customers are not local, they will want easy access to an airport.

Government work would generate most revenue initially; contracts with private companies would gradually become more important. The endowment, raised over a three-year period, would allow the lab to hire six people. Matching funds from WSU would add three more positions. Within a few years, Gupta expects ASL to generate contracts worth up to $5 million a year, a level that would sustain directly and indirectly more than 100 workers. Activity might double after 10 years.

Gupta says the endowment is needed to provide some financial security for scientists who would be taking a risk relocating to a community with little way to absorb them and their unique talents if ASL is not a success. As a contract lab, ASL would not offer the hope of near-term fortunes to the kind of entrepreneurial scientists he would like to attract. Their payoff would come with a second-generation, wholly private ASL2 where they would have more scientific and financial freedom.

Before returning to WSU in 1981 — he earned his doctorate there in 1972 — Gupta himself worked at such a company. SRI International, a spinoff from Stanford University, generated $262 million in revenue last year, and employed 1,400. Twenty other companies have been founded by former employees.

Gupta has dedicated considerable effort to the ASL in the last year, but the Shock Physics Institute would remain his home. The lab would be financially independent, hiring its own business manager and research staff.

Aside from its financial payoffs, Gupta says the lab will help Spokane by raising its profile in the scientific community, and providing research and educational opportunities for professors and students at Spokane’s other institutions of higher learning.

“You have to create an environment of intellectual excitement,” he says.

But first, he knows, he must create some financial excitement.

“I do not underestimate the challenge,” Gupta says. “Spokane has to step up to the plate.”

We will not be tearing things apart in Spokane unless we can put together $15 million.

Think of the impact.