Another Alternative to ISS-Based Research (Update)
Magnetically-levitated Flies Offer Clues to Future of Life in Space
“Using powerful magnets to levitate fruit flies can provide vital clues to how biological organisms are affected by weightless conditions in space, researchers at The University of Nottingham say. The team of scientists has shown that simulating weightlessness in fruit flies here on earth with the use of magnets causes the flies to walk more quickly — the same effect observed during similar experiments on the International Space Station.”
While NASA Flies In Circles Technology Advances Back on Earth, earlier post
“Growing perfect crystals in space (on the Space Shuttle and Space Station) has been one of NASA’s favorite promotional items in its mantra of promoting the use of the ISS as a “world class laboratory”. The need for large crystals grown at great expense in space is quickly vanishing due to advances made on Earth.”
Keith’s 4 Jan note: To be certain, while people are now finding ways to examine phenomena on Earth that were once thought to only be possible – or practical – on the ISS, there is still a vast, untapped potential for the ISS. If only NASA would get out of its own way in this regard. Meanwhile CASIS, the entity created to maximize the utilization of U.S. assets on the ISS, has a web page that is inert and has not changed for months. They do not seem to have any staff (other than a director). If they do, then CASIS has no interest in telling anyone who these people are, what they do, or how to contact them.
Keith’s 5 Jan update: I tweeted this today: “@ISS_NatLab — when will CASIS start to *do* something? bit.ly/A2Hvat”. The response? “@NASAWatch CASIS in process of building staff & preparing to take over research planning. You’ll have to ask them yourself for more details.” I then replied “@ISS_NatLab — in other words you – #NASA – do not really know what CASIS is doing.” and the response I got was “@NASAWatch If you want details on CASIS internal plans, you will need to ask them directly. Our focus is the transition, which is underway.”
But I will bet you that CASIS is getting paid…for what, I do not know. But the cash is flowing into their coffers.
Using magnetic fields to suspend fruit flies doesn’t strike me as the same as zero gravity. I would think that the researchers would need to compare the magnetic field results to actual microgravity results in order to determine if the effects are similar.
Jeff,
I agree. Even at the small scale involved with fruit flies, when you consider the huge difference in relative strengths between the electromagnetic and gravitational forces, considering them as having interchangeable or equivalent effects on a mass doesn’t seem valid. And as we increase the size, and therefore masses involved, say to human scale, the substitution would be increasingly invalid. There may be some valid information derived from these experiments, but I can’t imagine anything relevant to human or spacecraft weightlessness activities.
Steve
In my experience, it is not at all uncommon that a company, in many fields, including aerospace, will bid on a contract using somewhat fictitious assets and management, because their attitude (consciously or unconsciously) is: If we get the job, then we’ll figure out how to actually do it.
It would appear that CASIS is some unknown number of people who have taken this one step further: If we get the contract, then we’ll start creating a company to figure out how to do the job.
This is certainly a cost effective way to operate, if you can get away with it, but it doesn’t make the entity awarding the contract look very well informed. This, if it is what’s actually happening, is mighty risky for all parties involved, and I wouldn’t look for any actual useful work to get done any time soon.
In a time where budgets and legislators are killing off so many opportunities, it seems ludicrous that NASA would throw away opportunities, which is what I think is happening here. If the oversight watchdogs are awake, then CASIS had better watch out for the axe.
Steve
CASIS was selected because their management proposal was the most consistent with the philosophy that the agency thinks is necessary to make the National Lab a success. They were selected with the full knowledge that it would take some time to build the organization up from the small core team that developed the proposal.
That process is on-going, but it doesn’t mean nothing is happening. We’re working with their ops team to get them ready to take over research planning in the next ISS Program cycle. NASA management is working with their market development team to set up the Research Marketplace in time for the 1st Annual ISS R&D Conference in June. We are jointly developing and will jointly lead the Utilization Workshop on the last day.
http://astronautical.org/no…
With all due respect to Mr. Cowing, he is throwing stones, rather than asking thoughtful questions.
Justin: Why is there no mention of this workshop on their website – if it is such a big deal, they should. These CASIS people cannot even update a simple website to tell taxpayers – stakeholders – and future users of the ISS what they are doing? Not a good sign. Stones will continue to be thrown.
Justin: Your knowledge of CASIS sounds considerable, you must be close to their team. You say the CASIS management proposal was the most consistent with the philosophy that the agency (NASA) thinks is necessary to make the National Lab a success.
What actions in the proposal tie directly to a success? Can you give us an example, just one?
We heard that USRA Battelle and others wanted to run the ISS. Those organizations are very large and have been around forever. You characterize CASIS as a small team and that they need time to build their organization. Why would NASA award a management contract to a little team to handle a $100 Billion dollar system? Do you know why? What does CASIS have that Battelle didn’t have?
Why do you say that NASA management is working with the CASIS market development team ~ in time for some conference? We think a lot of people here thought that the effort was to make the Space Station productive more than to prepare for some conference presentation. And June is what 1/2 a year away? Isn’t that pathetically far away?
I’m not throwing stones. You sound really optimistic. We’d just like some answers.
Also, we noticed that your You Tube talk says that you are the ISS Utilization Relationship Manager. Psych on the title! We were confused though by your charts because they looked like you are at a stage of trying to figure out your Identity and how to relate and Invent some Workshops so you can figure out what needs to be figured out. It looked like a good idea but maybe it would take some years before anything solid comes out of it.
If you are in to this utilization thing is there some major breakthrough on ISS that people are going to see soon or are you having conferences to talk and see what you can come up with?
We wonder if the ISS is just for NASA people to use and figure out astronaut living ops with or moon trips or if anyone is supposed to do something really serious with it. Is it a toy? Is the ISS made so universities can play with science in space? Is the ISS mostly a STEM activity for kids so they know space is cool? Or will it ever do anything useful for grown-ups?
How long will CASIS take? We are guessing two or three years, maybe more. We wondered, have you seen any plans from them? Are they really cool plans?
I support the ISS National Laboratory Office at Johnson Space Center, so I’ve been watching CASIS form and will soon be handing over the reigns for research planning and social media to them. By research planning, I specifically mean the development of flight manifests and on-orbit requirements for a given Expedition on the Space Station.
I was not on the selection board, though, since I’m not a civil servant. As I understand it, the CASIS proposal built on the ProOrbis reference model and that’s why it was selected. In particular, CASIS will be focused over the next year on building what they call, the “Marketplace”. It will be a virtual community where investors, researchers, and implementation partners (people with spaceflight HW experience) can come together and, with CASIS facilitation, figure out how best to bring research and product lines to fruition.
CASIS will also have Science and Economic Collegiums that assess the scientific merit and economic value of proposals that come their way, so the organization can prioritize what gets sent to the Space Station in terms of what will have the most benefit for the nation.
The conference is important is because that will be the first opportunity for CASIS to bring people from across the various stakeholder communities under one roof and kick off the Marketplace.
I believe the charts you are referring to, though, are from my talk last year about the NASA Forward professional development community. That is separate from my work supporting the ISS National Laboratory and those were preliminary concepts for how that group might move forward. I would caution you not to confuse the two. 🙂
The whole point behind the National Laboratory is to open the ISS up for serious business, as was mandated to NASA by Congress. We’ve already had some success with this through companies like NanoRacks, LLC, and the upcoming Nitrous Oxide Fuel Blend Experiment in development by Innovative Space Propulsion Systems. Because CASIS can independently develop new sources of capital and pursue marketing strategies that NASA cannot as an executive agency, we expect they will take this to the next level.
“the CASIS proposal built on the ProOrbis reference model and that’s why it was selected”
Justin,
You made the above statement. I don’t understand how this was seen as good move since, according to reports sanctioned by NASA, ProOrbis has not been used for comparable projects in the past, so it is actually (my opinion) an additional risk.
Also, you say twice in your post that you “support” the ISS National Laboratory. I’m not challenging, simply trying to understand, when I ask: what does “support” entail?
Like GAOrwell, I’m not clear on your relationship to the ISS/CASIS hand-off (if it is, in fact, a hand-off; the term “partner” in my mind implies an additional player, not an alternative player taking over).
Steve
Thanks for the summary Justin. So you are relinquishing your role at NASA of handling research planning and manifests and moving that to CASIS control? We assume you were good at your job but that they are better than you are, so you are giving the job to them?
We don’t understand what you mean by product lines above. What products are to be produced?
The NOFBE sounds interesting but seems to do more with propulsion systems than to do with direct Space Station laboratory facility science of usefulness. We looked at NanoRacks that you’ve mentioned, but do not understand what they do other than some educational science for kids. Will this be the amazing use of the Space Station?
The conference sounds interesting but is it just another session where 500 scientists show up and present and then nothing happens? Or are there tens of millions of dollars of investment money that will be there to fund the science and research that will supposedly be discussed there?
Or maybe the money isn’t of interest to the scientists and that they can just all be together in one place will be a great thing. Is that it?
We wondered too, in all of your time in your NASA position, have you ever worked on or even seen anything amazingly useful come from the Space Station? Not peripheral rocket stuff or operational things like EVAs or hand drills, but things that came out of the laboratory facilities.
We are relinquishing that research planning role because CASIS will be responsible for the scientific and economic valuation of new payloads coming into the National Laboratory.
I look at it more that the National Lab Office has been a caretaker for the ISS National Laboratory past two years. Now that the non-profit has been selected and is nearly ready to stand on its own, that caretaker role is no longer needed.
By product lines, I mean that CASIS will assess the pathways from research to actual commercial products for anyone who comes to them with a serious proposal that needs the microgravity or space environment to bring it to fruition. You might look at what Astrogenetix has done with vaccine research as an example of what this might look like.
As for NanoRacks, they got their start primarily with STEM education projects, but they do have commercial research customers lined up. The exact information on their industry customers is proprietary, though. I can assure you that we’ll see more from them in the near future, though.
NOFBX, if it works as advertised, could replace hydrazine for on-orbit propulsion. ISPS has identified markets for satellite propulsion, crew vehicle RCS, and suborbital vehicles as areas where they could break into with this technology. By demonstrating it on the Station, they can get out of the technology “valley of death” and build flight heritage on a crewed vehicle.
I, personally, think the most beneficial aspect of the conference will be the workshop on the last day where we will show new researchers how they can work with CASIS to find investors and implementation partners to bring their research from concept to flight.
Most of the research on Station thus far has been focused on meeting NASA needs. To date, the most important things we’ve learned from ISS are how to build and sustain large, crewed structures in space with an international team.
For science, though, I’m actually really excited to see what comes out of the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer. The AMS team is essentially using the universe as a particle accelerator and will comb through the deluge of data they are collecting to see what secrets they can tease out.
Steve, like I said, I wasn’t on the selection board, but my impression is that the CASIS proposal offered the preferred model for clearly developing the National Laboratory to provide scientific and economic benefit back to the nation. I can’t give you any further details on that because I am not privy to them.
In my current role, I develop the research planning inputs for the National Laboratory, provide as-needed assistance for National Lab payload developers navigating the NASA system (in other words, “other duties as assigned”), develop long-term resource requirement estimates for the National Lab, administer the National Lab social media accounts, and assess the technical and programmatic progress of some of the projects NASA has funded to expand the ISS’ capability as a National Lab, such as NOFBX and a microplate reader that NanoRacks is modifying for on-orbit sample analysis.
GA,
You’ve asked a lovely set of pointed questions; well thought out. Unfortunately, I don’t see anything new in Justins’s reply; basically the same marketing-speak and ISS users that we’ve heard before, and still no details. There may be a whole lot going on, but if so, they don’t seem to want to tell us about it. If CASIS is working now on the things that Justin implies, then I have to wonder what the NASA people were doing before CASIS. I really don’t like to be negative, but based on the evidence (or lack of) I’m glad I wasn’t holding my breath. If more people go after CASIS with a list of essential questions, like yours above, perhaps we will see some signs of progress, or at least get a better picture of where things stand.
Steve
If you want to know what we’ve been doing the past two years, you can always go look at our website: http://www.nasa.gov/mission…
I am not in a position to speak to details on CASIS’ plan, so I am not going to. They will do so when they are ready.
Justin,
This topic of the thread (ISS/CASIS) is becoming hard to follow because of the way that DISQUS is sorting things, so this post may well make little sense because of where it appears on the page (we’re nested too deep for DISQUS).
Someone please set me straight if I’m wrong, but what I’m getting from all of this is:
1) CASIS will be selecting the projects to be run on the ISS after handover.
2) The primary orientation for CASIS will be experiments/research with the best likelihood of leading to products.
3) CASIS will be “marketing” the ISS facilities to commercial interests, based on #2 above.
If this is basically correct, then it becomes clear why there has been confusion and wrong assumptions — we have a “National” lab, built (and to date operated) by public money, that’s being handed off to a non-profit agency to run, but it is (under CASIS) going to be concentrating on commercial product R&D and testing, rather than basic scientific knowledge.
If what I’ve said is true, then the obvious question is: who will be paying for the operation of ISS? Are the people who will be using the ISS (those to whom CASIS marketed its facilities) being paying the operating costs? in whole or in part? Or is a large chunk of NASA’s budget supposed to keep paying for it?
NASA doing basic research (even the far out stuff) that leads to knowledge of benefit to an entire industry is, in my mind, a very different thing from research for a targeted product, likely to be useful to a small number of companies, maybe even only one. And what about things like patents? If a product patent is granted for a product that can be produced as a result of research done on the ISS (the “National” lab), is that justified? I believe that legal precedent will dictate that such a patent can not be granted (but people will try anyhow and expensive, time-wasting court battles will probably follow).
The introduction of that single word — product — in conjunction with the ISS, which I’m seeing today for the first time, changes everything.
Steve
CASIS will not be selecting all research for the Station. NASA will still be responsible for exploration and SMD research done on Station.
CASIS will be responsible for the National Lab allocation set aside by Congress, which is to make the Station more accessible to industry, other government agencies, and education partners. That may still include basic scientific research, but such proposals will be evaluated in terms of their promise for leading to big breakthroughs for the nation.
NASA will be responsible for maintaining and operating the Station itself and NASA-owned facilities on the ISS, but implementation partners (like NanoRacks, for example) can own their own hardware and facilities or make arrangements to use existing facilities on the Station, perhaps through such mechanisms as reimbursable Space Act Agreements.
Unless NASA is paying directly for the research, though, the agency does not own the intellectual property. For something like NOFBX, we have a cooperative agreement where NASA is paying for data produced by the project to build the agency’s institutional knowledge of the propellant, but ISP Systems still owns the propellant and thruster technology and retains the ability to market it as a future product.
NASA will not have a claim to future CASIS-sponsored research that is self-funded, any more than the government can claim commercial research done at terrestrial national laboratories. In fact, CASIS’ goal is to be entirely self-funded within a few years and be able to decline the seed funding they are currently receiving.
Companies like have already filed patents based on research they did on Shuttle flights, so I don’t imagine this would be any different.
Steve,
Your post is disturbing. Do you think that CASIS is a shell with fictitious assets and management? What you’re saying is that the United States has a ficitious firm running a NASA system worth tens of billions? Would the White House and Congress and NASA approve that? You say this is common? I’d think most would say the axe will should down on a lot of necks for negligent oversight. Isn’t the CASIS group some private sector firm? Wouldn’t they have a Board of Directors? Shouldn’t a Board have well known experts on it? This smells like some kind of asylum or con game. Who was put in power to do this? If it is all ficitious, who is responsible? Do you know anyone in CASIS Steve?
GA,
On rereading my post, I think I should have been more precise in my wording. I stand by my statement that “it is not at all uncommon that a company, in many fields, including aerospace, will bid on a contract using somewhat fictitious assets and management, but when I said in the following paragraph that “It would appear…” that CASIS is such a case, I was sloppy. I am not saying that this is the case with the CASIS proposal (I have no evidence either way), but rather that what we’ve seen (and/or haven’t seen) is consistent with the with the scenario of describing/claiming assets and management experience which, at the time of proposal, didn’t actually exist.
So, I’m not saying that “the United States has a fictitious firm running a NASA system worth tens of billions,” but it both walks and talks like a duck, so there’s a real possibility (in my assessment) that it is a duck.
In response to your question “Wouldn’t they have a Board of Directors?” Presumably all of the contenders described a Board of Directors in their proposals, but does a board actually exist? and how experienced are they? Again — if the contract gets awarded — then we can upgrade or start more fully using their expertise. In the case of a younger, growing company, and in the current constraining economic climate, can the bidder actually afford to attract and pay a Board of Directors appropriate to the proposed contract, or must they first acquire the income associated with the earlier program milestones (progress payments) to be able to attract and pay a high-caliber Board? Once again, I’m not saying that this is the case with CASIS, only that the observed facts support that scenario.
As for being an asylum or con game, no, I don’t think so; it’s just a less than ideal method of doing business, a step often employed by smaller companies trying to grow (or sometimes fading companies trying to recuperate).
“Who was put in power to do this? If it is all fictitious, who is responsible?” — if this was a unique situation, then we might be able to go after answers to these questions, but it is not unique; it happens all the time and has done for many, many years. It’s a situation that just sort of grew because people were getting away with it, and it is not illegal, unless you try to claim that it’s fraud, which is a losing case because legal precedent has been established by the fact that people haven’t, in the past, gone that route (a strange quirk of law). As for your specific question: “Who was put in power to do this?” — nobody was; it is a “crime” of omission.
Your last question — “Do you know anyone in CASIS Steve?” — No, I do not. I was simply pointing out the possibility, because the observed facts are consistent with the scenario I described, particularly the apparent lack of progress, and I must stress the word “apparent,” because I haven’t made it a full-time job monitoring CASIS/ISS activities.
So, thank you for your critique of my post. I should have been more careful in my wording.
Thanks,
Steve