Among stodgy government agencies, DARPA, the skunkworks within the US Defence Department, has a sleek reputation for producing cool killer apps (and not just for killing — recent projects include work on improving vaccine effectiveness). The acronym carries so much cachet that other agencies are copying it. In 2008, the Intelligence Advanced Research Project Agency (IARPA) got its first director, in an effort to ramp up the blue-sky research efforts of the US intelligence community. In this year’s stimulus package, Congress gave the Department of Energy money to get something called ARPA-E going, since EARPA just didn’t quite have the same ring to it.

Now, the National Academies is telling NASA not to miss out. In a review of the US civil space programme released today — not to be confused with the Augustine Commission review of NASA’s human spaceflight programme — a panel of scientists is calling for NASA to have its own ARPA. But what would it be called? NARPA? ARPA-S, for Space? SARPA? This would be fitting, since DARPA was formed in 1958 as something of a space research agency in response to Sputnik.