Pressure on CASIS Mounts
CASIS Names Dr. Timothy J. Yeatman Interim Chief Scientist, CASIS
“The Center for the Advancement of Science in Space (CASIS), the nonprofit organization managing research onboard the International Space Station U.S. National Laboratory, today named renowned surgeon and researcher Timothy J. Yeatman, M.D., as CASIS Interim Chief Scientist. Additionally, Dr. Alan Stern, a planetary scientist, aerospace consultant, and former NASA executive, has been appointed CASIS Scientific Advisor. Doctors Yeatman and Stern will lead research initiatives for the organization.
Hearing Notes: Charles Bolden Testifies on NASA’s FY 2013 Budget (22 March 2012)
“Rep. Wolf suggested that NASA needs to look at CASIS carefully saying “if they are not with it in 30-45 days we should pull it and give it to NSF”. Bolden replied that a letter was being sent to CASIS to remind them of their milestones and “if they they do not meet milestones we will find another way”.”
Ohio Delegation Calls on NASA To Fire ISS Nonprofit, Space News
“Members of Ohio’s congressional delegation urged NASA to strip a Florida nonprofit of its status as manager of the international space station’s national laboratory and give the job to a Cleveland-based group instead.”
Brown Urges NASA Leadership To Reconsider Contract For The International Space Station National Laboratory
“CASIS was hired to develop research pathways that connect basic and applied research, and develop a pipeline of funding and projects to support the wide range of research opportunities available in the ISS U.S. National Laboratory. It is the general impression of the situation that CASIS is neither performing this type of work, nor actively heading toward being able to perform this type of work. Because of the limited life of the ISS, it may be time to consider a switch in leadership for this activity.”
Keith’s note: It has been 14 days since Wolf’s comments. The clock is ticking for CASIS. The NASA Inspector General’s Office is looking into CASIS issues and a request for a GAO study of CASIS is being considered in Congress. And now the Ohio delegation is calling for NASA’s agreement with CASIS to be cancelled. Do these appointments announced today by CASIS count as being “with it” (as Rep. Wolf suggested) or is this just rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic? Stay tuned.
Earlier CASIS posts
Wolf’s just playing politics, grandstanding to make something out of a manufactured failure.
Perhaps he thinks no one will notice … after an investigation concludes months/years later … culpability of his DC buddies too.
Screw all this nonsense. Those that agreed to CASIS are the ones that need to carry the water now – if they made the accommodation for a weak institution, then they needed to be the “strong” force that protected it – that was the duty.
The issue is abrogation of duty … by those loud mouths on the Hill.
The finger pointing is only going to get worse.
USRA was astounded when CASIS got the contract. Apparently CASIS bid lower and yes, NASA _always_ picks the low bidder, even if it is a small business that was created from whole cloth just for this proposal and the bid is unrealistically low.
Now, I have had mixed feelings about USRA in the past, but I know people who work for USRA. At least they have done this kind of work as a company, and have actual payload scientists on their staff, and their bid was at least somewhat realistic. Which made it too high for NASA contracting officers who have amazingly little practical knowledge of the work for which they are choosing suppliers.
Full disclosure: I used to work for USRA in the late 80s on space life science projects. That said, USRA has decades of experience on things like this and could have hit the ground running – unlike CASIS which seems to be so clueless as to what research is done on ISS that they had to put an RFI out so people could tell them what is important and what they’d like to do. Moreover the advisors, and review panels etc. that CASIS has just started to announce should have been in place months ago. This nonsense about needing time to “stand up the organization” that CASIS likes to use is just an excuse to cover up the fact that they had no idea what they were getting into when they submitted their proposal. When I ran peer review panels for NASA space life science at AIBS I used to assemble these panels- by myself – in a matter of days. Been there, done that.
Dogstar and Keith, you seem to know a lot about USRA and think they have the right experience to manage the ISS. If that’s true, help with this. If you look at the USRA website, in as much as they have a lot of space research, very little of it relates directly to the use of the space station.
The USRA experience appears to mainly be in scientific computing, earth science, lunar and planetary science, astronomy, astrophysics, education and outreach, energy storage and nuclear propulsion. I’m sure all of that is great and they’ve made amazing discoveries in those areas. Have they?
Their website does make some mention of microgravity and biomedical and life sciences, but not much. I found very little direct experience with the space station. I searched at length to find a single science breakthrough, one done on the space station, attributable to USRA, but found none. If they had just started research efforts that would be understandable. But Keith, you said you were working with USRA in 1980 on space life science projects. That was 32 years ago! Does that mean in 32 years they have not yet discovered anything remarkable from all of their space research?
If I missed their webpage that tells why they are the best in the world to run the space station and lists their major discoveries and how those discoveries have profoundly benefited humanity, show me the page if its there. If USRA people are reading this, then by all means help is needed. Post the headline breakthroughs that have come from the years of research and space station science, so they can be understood by all.
With hundreds of universities tied to USRA, one would expect that a good number of extraordinary science discoveries would have been made using the space station over the last ten years alone, so sharing the top three that were made on the ISS should be easy.
While USRA may have the right sort of people, the people put in charge of the ISS bid had, as NASA scientists, been offered the opportunity to manage science on the ISS and they decided they did not want to be in charge of it. So a lot of us just figured they had their chance and turned it down, so they do not get another opportunity. If they’d taken charge of research management 10 years ago, ISS might not be in the situation it finds itself today.
Littrow, your last statement is exactly what someone observing all of this would conclude.
Ten years earlier they said they wanted to do world class science instead of ISS science management or science integration. No one was sure why they thought they could do world class science since they’d never done it previously. They wiped out ISS research integration and they wiped out many of our careers too. And that world class science-never materialized. Space and Life Sciences no longer exists. Life Sciences, which is whats left of their organization is a shadow of its former self. 25 years ago the organization designed the ISS, probably had more to do with the ISS design and configuration than any other organization. 20 years ago the organization was managing Spacelabs and Spacehabs and most middeck payloads.15 years ago the organization managed NASA-Mir. Now the same organization has no integral role in virtually any aspect of human space flight. Those people were on the destructive path for everyone involved.
I want to make clear that I was not saying USRA was the perfect candidate. I was just saying that they were at least a credible candidate. If there were better ones, by all means chime in.
But NASA seems to be looking to private industry to pull some sort of scientific miracle out of the ISS that will justify its cost. This is simply unrealistic. NASA needs to develop its own scientific leadership. And CASIS is focusing on biomedical applications, which are exaggerated, when there is much more potential in earth and space observation.
… NASA seems to be looking to private industry to pull some sort of scientific miracle out of the ISS …
Correct.
NASA needs to develop its own scientific leadership.
It does have such. But for specific areas. Just like other scientific institutions.
However, the ISS is about managing a bunch of competing institutions such that you get a steady flow of research products out of them in aggregate.
NASA, like most, bumps its own to the front, and devil take the hindmost. Just like when a particle accelerator or observatory is run by a University and not a separate managing entity.
… CASIS is focusing on biomedical applications, …
Which was why they were selected. The kind of success some want to see. Yet the ISS and its rules are not currently conducive to.
To give you some idea of the issues in the industry is struggling with, check out Drug development: Raise standards for preclinical cancer research. Even if we have trouble with these on Earth as Bayer/Amgen suggest, imagine how they make things even harder on the ISS. Not a immediate “gold mine”.
more potential in earth and space observation.
Yes. But not the gold mine they desire.
“NASA needs to develop its own scientific leadership.”NASA HAD scientific leadership in human space flight. NASA scientific leadership HAD led research in the life, space and earth sciences until ISS began operations in the late 90s. NASA continued to maintain its space sciences (not that interested in research on ISS) but much of the life sciences was tossed out. The situation was further damaged by Constellation when in search of funds, Griffin and the still in place NASA leadership stole much of the science funding and cancelled the research programs.The Griffin philosophy, also espoused by those still in place today in NASA leadership, was that “NASA is all about engineering and operations and not science. If you want science, get the National Institutes of Health or The National Academy of Sciences to pay for it”. Interesting, but a new concept and it has not worked out. If you want space based research, mainly NASA has to pay for it. If you want an ISS in orbit but no plan for its use, that is pretty much what we have in place today. It was naive shortsightedness spurred on by chauvinism that said engineering and operations are whats important. From what I’ve seen an awful lot of money went mainly to operations for very ineffective and inefficient use. And the more money they took the less efficient and effective they got. From my perspective, research is every bit as significant an aspect of the civilian space program, otherwise you wind up with systems and no plan for their use. Actually, when it came to Constellation and Orion, their inefficiency has led to no system for a generation, and no plan for research in the present.
Focusing on USRA vs CASIS may not be the issue either but just more hairsplitting.
My issue at the start of this was in knowing what it takes to oversee a “national lab”. Everybody wants to have it their way, and they think it easy to do. The hard parts of managing a research lab that actually produces a reliable research product are the intrigues brought on by the extreme budgets/risks/scope/demands.
Smaller organizations function like butterflies in a wind tunnel. As long as the fan is turned down (e.g. the power brokers police the other interests), you might get by. As long as the protectors are mindful.
ISS is not on a scale or in a condition where I feel comfortable with a small organization. It reminds me of when the University of California “inherited” a major lab that they didn’t build, it had been constructed for the wrong reasons and as designed could never generate a research product as designed. As UC reworked it, there was constant chaos generated to fight getting it into a tractable form, not unlike what we are seeing here (the small scale noise). It took the political muscle of UC to keep from being jerked around.
What I said at the beginning of this, still holds. If you want to play at “national research lab”, choose small “jerk aroundable” organizations, play little games between them, possibly shut them down to start up new ones. Maybe it will work, maybe it won’t. But I guess you’ll enjoy the soap opera you created for your entertainment. Until you de-orbit.
That is why you did it, wasn’t it?
If it is going to be a national lab, you go to an existing organization like the other national labs. And you must realize that its not a small lab by physical size, but the largest lab by the scope of where it is, so you actually need to manage it with the largest of the organization management, and even then Congress will have to oversight that management more so than they realize. It is a bigger task than people want to admit to – that is the origin of the abrogation of duty.
It will then be transformed into a reliable research product producer for a consistent budget. The IP’s will incrementally assume like roles similar to other activities of like kind, after a period of discord. And then you’ll be able to see the true costs and true results – which will not be assessable any other way.
And this has been true since the 60’s.
I seem to find alot of people who complain about what others do on this blog. I would suggest that maybe people try to talk with people in the know about what is really going on instead of throwing jabs at everyone. I try to find facts before I conclude things are a failure. We all know that space is hard and things are not easy. I look forward to the day that people quit spending time throwing spears and they get to the point where they try to help instead of trashing folks and other peoples decisions. Do some real fact finding and I think you might be surprised about what is going on. Just a thought.
bhspace,
Space is hard. Jabs and spear throwing frequently result from a lack of information and a lack of connectivity, in this instance between CASIS and the space and even moreso the user community. When the community does not see anything happening they tend to conclude, perhaps rightfully so, that performance is at a zero level. From your post it seems like you know more and are more optimistic than many. You suggest that “people….try to help…” Can you explain how people here and elsewhere would help? Why don’t you help everyone here and share some of the facts you know or have heard? Given prevailing pressures and questions it is not a time to be vague about things. Better speak now or forever – – –