Google has leased a large piece of land at Moffett Field, the former Naval air station near Mountain View, from NASA. The 42 acres will be the construction place for up to 1.2 million square feet of office and research facilities.

Google needed space near its Mountain View headquarters before its existing facilities are overcrowded. The new campus will be linked to the old headquarters through road modifications, which, if approved, will make going from one place to the other a short drive.

The search engine leader has thus secured necessary space to accommodate new employees needed to fuel its booming growth. Furthermore, the lease is also an opportunity for the two parties to launch collaborations in high-tech projects, mostly regarding software and computing. NASA and Google already have a good relationship which yielded the Planetary Content project and Google Earth's NASA layer.

Also, Google's bosses land their private jets at Moffett Field already. The new campus will include housing for employees, an important tool to lure in valuable engineers and other people that Google might need.

The deal will cost Google an initial base rent of $3.66 million per year, which may rise in time, money that NASA will use to cover the full cost of the lease and the balance for maintenance, capital revitalization, and improvements of the real property assets at Ames.

The actual building process will take another 5 years to start: phase one will begin in September 2013, phase two will begin in 2018, and phase three is planned for 2022.