[ajratner]

The patents are assigned to NASA (see for example: http://assignments.uspto.gov/assignments/q?db=pat&pat=75...). If NASA had been funding an outside contractor they would have had a non-exclusive non-transferable 'walk-in' license to the patents; however they must have invented them in-house and so they own them.

One could argue that even though NASA = the gov't funded the R&D that resulted in these patents, they don't need the monopoly rights of patents because if others then take their ideas, no loss!- it could just be considered stimulus spending, which is arguably part of the government's mandate anyway and thus not just a net loss of money on the budget balance sheet...

However, and in my opinion far more importantly, there is a nice incentive structure at work here to the general benefit, which is that by allowing NASA to own and sell intellectual property- but only via the public patent system- you give them a monetary incentive to disclose their patents and put the technology behind them into the public domain. If they had no rights to own the technology, then they would have no clear incentive to ever release it (which is what government agencies do anyway with many top secret technologies- these it does not own exclusivity to, which might be what you were thinking of). However this way, there was an incentive for NASA to file a patent, it did, and people could have been doing incremental/additive R&D based on the publicly disclosed invention spec for the past three years. "On the shoulders of giants" is still a decent credo generally, even (or especially, depending on your perspective) if you have to pay said giant a small licensing fee sometimes...

(Of course there are other huge problems with the patent system but in my opinion this fundamental tenet of creating an incentive structure which encourages (a) invention and (b) disclosure is still- theoretically at least- a vastly good thing for us)