The Profit Mission : NASA's product-development program is under fire.

Here's a tag you don't see much, but should: "Made in Outer Space." Thanks to the commercial minds inside NASA, many of Earth's consumer goods have distant origins in the U.S. space program. There's Zen perfume from Shiseido, derived from a 1998 shuttle experiment that found that a rose's scent changes outside the atmosphere. There are shock-resistant shoes--made by Modellista--that use a special foam of NASA origin. And Berlei's Shock Absorber sports bra claimed (accurately) in an ad featuring tennis bombshell Anna Kournikova that it was made with NASA technology.

All good fun. But in the aftermath of the Columbia disaster, the value of commercial research on missions has come into question. STS-107--the final flight of the Columbia--had 80 experiments on board, including five that were conducted by the astronauts for private companies, funded almost entirely by NASA. One was for International Flavors & Fragrances (IFF), which extracted the smell of a rose in space and was back seeking new scents. The other commercial experiments involved studies of ways to fight fire using fine water mist, grow proteins with greater resilience to disease, manufacture crystals for such uses as hydrogen fuel storage and advance cancer-cell research. Is all this worth pursuing in space? The Bush administration doesn't think so: even before the Columbia went down, it had announced unspecified cuts in NASA's product-development program, even as it raised the agency's overall budget to $15.5 billion. The 2004 proposal deemed the commercial program purely "promotional."

NASA cites the societal benefits of commercial spinoffs when justifying the cost of manned space flight, now about $500 million per shuttle mission. The idea of searching for profit in space originally came from Congress, which created a program to transfer NASA technology to the private sector back in 1962. That evolved into NASA's Space Product Development Program, which now works with more than 160 companies, including the likes of Ford and Hewlett- Packard. Since 1976 NASA has heralded more than 1,300 examples of "successfully commercialized technology" in an annual magazine called Spinoff. Space enthusiasts claim spinoffs ...