DARPA Ideas for NASA Commercialization

DARPA's Autonomous Urban Challenge, a contest for remotely-controlled cars, has stimulated lots of innovative technologies and earth applications, such as open-pit mining vehicles described here by TORC Technologies. Future applications could be innovations for car, truck and bus systems.

http://engineeringtv.com/video/Commercializing-Autonomous-Vehi?page=2

NASA has a long history of tech transfers, but needs to ramp up its emphasis on sustainable earth applications like TORC, which will generate a lot more jobs than commercial space flight alone. European Space Agency experts estimate a 20x economic multiplier for each Euro of space spending, so the economic growth potential is enormous for NASA.