A NASA-funded technology-transfer office has agreed to pay $88,500 a year to rent space at DuPage Airport under a lease that won preliminary approval Wednesday from an airport board committee.
The office, which would be managed for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration by Battelle Memorial Institute, is expected to advance efforts to bring a high-tech business and research park to the West Chicago airfield.
About seven employees are expected to staff the NASA Illinois Commercialization Center when it begins operating later this year.
Battelle Memorial Institute is a not-for-profit research, development, engineering and consulting giant that manages in the Midwest a NASA program intended to make space-related technology available for commercial use.
Technologies developed by NASA have been put to many uses by the private sector, including the development of heart pumps and processes for restoring artwork.
About $1.85 million for the DuPage technology-transfer office was included in the federal budget this year at the behest of U.S. House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.), whose district includes the airport.
The office would occupy about 3,400 square feet on the second floor of the airport’s Flight Center beginning July 1, under terms of a five-year lease that won approval from the airport board’s Finance Committee. The full board is expected to vote Monday.
The NASA Illinois Commercialization Center is expected to become an anchor tenant in a high-tech research park planned for 750 vacant acres of airport-owned property along Roosevelt Road and Fabyan Parkway, north of Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory.
Also Wednesday, Finance Committee members recommended spending $875,000 toward rehabilitating a row of eight hangars on the northwest corner of the field.
In past years, the airport has rebuilt the ramp area around the hangars and replaced the roofs.
The airport now wants to remove and replace 25-year-old asphalt and concrete floors in the hangar bays, officials said.
The hangars’ T-shaped bays are fully leased and generate about $400,000 in annual revenues for the airport authority.
The airport will lose about $8,000 a month as tenants are moved out while work is being done.
“This is one of the major components to the long-term rehabilitation of these buildings,” said Gordon Cole, the airport’s executive director. “Once we’re done, we should get another 20 to 30 years out of them.”
