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Congress

House Appropriators Note CASIS Delays

By Keith Cowing
NASA Watch
April 27, 2012
Filed under , ,

House Appropriations Commitee FY 2013: CASIS and ISS (excerpt)
“An important element in the decision making about the long term status of ISS is whether it can demonstrate sufficient research value to justify the continuation of its operating budget. Currently, the fraction of the overall ISS budget devoted to research is extremely small, and plans for leveraging outside funding through the ISS National Lab are moving slowly because the National Lab’s manager, the Center for the Advancement of Science in Space (CASIS), is still establishing its management and governance structures …”

NASA Watch founder, Explorers Club Fellow, ex-NASA, Away Teams, Journalist, Space & Astrobiology, Lapsed climber.

20 responses to “House Appropriators Note CASIS Delays”

  1. bhspace says:
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    Really? The last thing a commercial lab manager needs is
    more NASA technical and management “support”. CASIS needs more of the
    fraction of the ISS budget to stimulate a research and investment pipeline. It
    also needs known, regular, and reliable reliable transportation logistics to be
    able to attract any research portfolio and commercial investment to ISS.  This is what NASA should focus on. Imagine
    trying to sell a high-throughput research proposition to pharma/bio when you
    have no idea when you can get to the lab or ever bring anything back. Good luck
    CASIS!

  2. dogstar29 says:
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    I am curious just how CASIS is supposed to use the “national lab” to “leverage” private funding for ISS. Let’s get real here. I’ve been talking to people in the pharmaceutical industry since the CFES days. That was when NASA first calculated the value of commodities per pound and decided that only drugs might be valuable enough to manufacture in space. All this time NASA has been trying to persuade the pharmaceutical industry that somehow by going into space they will discover a miracle drug. Industry has been saying that unless NASA is footing the bill they have no interest in it, not because industry is naive about what can be done in space, but because NASA is naive about what can be done on the ground. In reality, when you finally find the source of the funds, even “commercial” space biotech payloads are almost always funded by the taxpayers.

    Spaceflight does have real value, but that value is limited. We need to stop looking for payloads of infinite value and start doing something a lot harder; producing human spaceflight at affordable cost.

    • Anonymous says:
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      DogstarTres, It would be helpful if you would expand on the thoughts you have in your last paragraph. 

      • dogstar29 says:
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        Economically, human spaceflight is a typical luxury good with high elasticity of demand with changes in price. At $1M/seat there would be a market for 50-100 seats/yr. At $20M/seat, the demand was 1 or 2 per year. At $60M/seat the demand is zero, except for a few government customers with inelastic demand and only one monopoly supplier. Without an order-of-magnitude reduction in cost, the market cannot reach a viable size

        Second, may spacefans think price decreases with increasing demand. This is incorrect; see ECON101. Price increases as one moves up the supply curve. The entire price-supply curve can be shifted with new technology, but the supplier has no reason to introduce new technology if the market is small.

        • Anonymous says:
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          Thank you DogStarTres.  It is nice to see your economic and fiscal explanation and assessment.

          With respect to the 1st paragraph in your earlier post, you mention pharma’s disinterest in biopharma business activities in space and generally I agree with your observations.  

          There are one or two space-based bio-pharma manufacturing technology areas the pursuit of which show evidence of financial viability and that can only be done in space and that have a product value that is sufficiently in excess of on-orbit access costs to warrant pursuit.  These technologies did not exist back in the CFES day you mention; things change.  

          • dogstar29 says:
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            And these are ……? Don’t leave me in suspense. I you are reluctant to post you can email me at dogstar3 at vulturesquadron dot com

          • Anonymous says:
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            There is a class of pharmaceuticals that is currently manufactured in high volume ground-based facilities.  It has been for years.  The manufacturing quality is rather low.  If done on the ISS, the general conclusion is that these pharmaceuticals would have at least an order of magnitude higher efficacy and potency.  They result would be a super-potent class of drug products and more.

            The most likely research and business entities that will grasp and pursue this are outside of the U.S.: Europe, China, Japan, Russia, UAE. The U.S. is probably the least likely and least able to pursue and develop this science and market.  The U.S. is research funding starved.  The economy is bad.  Much of the pharma industry would view it as competitive and disruptive.  The regulatory environment is toxic.  Politics wouldn’t help either.  

            A detailed description is not difficult. But it leads to a question that I’ll pose to you: Is it best to broadband this information here?  Is your aim to empower foreign nations and enrich foreign economies using U.S. technology?   If that is the best action in your opinion, please comment.

  3. SkyKing_rocketmail says:
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    While concern about having put in place at considerable taxpayer expense a group that doesn’t seem to have a clue what they need to do is worthwhile, I wonder why no one was showing concern for the last three years that  a six person crew was in orbit or for the ten years before that that ISS was in orbit and functioning. It is not like NASA or the ISS program is a small group of people that can only focus on one thing at a time. In fact the ISS payloads/utilization organization was huge and it would be worthwhile to understand why with all these people and capabilities in place, there was apparently no plan to actually use the ISS. Congress and the NASA IG should have been looking at ISS utilization for some time.

    • kcowing says:
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      I totally agree. NASA’s favorite excuse is that the ISS was still under construction.  Yet they also said it was doing valuable research. They wanted to have it both ways.

      • npng says:
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        “Yet they [NASA] also said it was doing valuable research.”

        Keith, do you know if NASA has any professional, industry standard, accepted financial analysis tools that could be used to quantify the value of research done?  If they do, have you see the results?  If they don’t, how could they legitimately state what is valuable and what is not valuable?

        • kcowing says:
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          That is the eternal question, isn’t it? NASA loves to throw that” $7 returned to the economy for every $1 spent” phrase out yet no one at NASA can ever cite a source. As for econometrics – NASA plays with these things – sometimes- but they always, aways cook the books when it comes to plugging in numbers – such as neglecting the actual cost of a ride into space, the sunk investment in designing the Shuttle, ISS, etc – the things a real commercial concern would have to factor in. As such, NASA is able to make the numbers say whatever they want them to say. In the case of CASIS, ProOrbis has refused to explain anything about their secret analysis process. So how can anyone trust that there is any validity or reality to the numbers that NASA uses to justify ISS research, set costs, figure out return on investment, etc.?

          • npng says:
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            Congress and particularly OMB are not stupid.  They know when they are being given bogus outcome and return numbers and unfortunately NASA loses credibility, dramatically, from that.

            From your comment, I assume you have inquired about this ‘secret analysis process’ directly and explanations have been declined.

            NASA would do itself a great service if they would bring in high-end expertise to apply economic valuation rigor to assess the results and outcomes of their program activities.  Why they haven’t done this is sheer insanity.

    • DTARS says:
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      ISS is modular. Better late than never call Bigelow and add more capable rubber rooms. Or sell ISS to someone like Bigelow So that they would have the incentive to make it affordable and useful.

  4. Steve Whitfield says:
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    whether it can demonstrate sufficient research value to justify the continuation of its operating budget“In a non-government program, this would have been estimated/calculated before the first dollar was spent and a program number was assigned. How else could a budget and schedule possibly be derived? These answers are essential for coming up with meaningful numbers for what ISS would cost (to build and to operate; two separate issues) and whether it would be doable and sustainable from a cost point of view.To make matters worse, you couldn’t do these necessary up-front calculations without knowing, in detail, exactly what the ISS was to be used for throughout its expected life — its functional requirements.Now, here we are, with building completed, and Congress is finally (and suddenly) saying that the purpose of a portion of the ISS (US National Lab) is experimentation, and publicly commanding NASA to make it happen. In other words, they’ve created this new entity by renaming part of the ISS, years after the fact and expect everybody to jump through hoops. Why was all of this not specified, worked out, and documented during the entire decade during which the ISS was being built? Better yet, why was it not done before the decision was made to build the ISS? People complain about the amount of money NASA spent building the ISS, but as I see it, the source of the waste, inefficiency and delay is with the powerful people who have been calling the shots, people who evidently couldn’t plan a trip to the bathroom, let alone a space program. These people call themselves Congress. Their job, it seems, is to be inconsistent, stick their nose into anything and everything, at all levels, make tasks that they mandate to hard-working people as difficult as possible, and then publicly insult those same hard-working people when they can’t do the magic expected of them.The ISS situation is inexcusable in my mind; so much potential thrown away. I liken it to a new model family car coming down the last stages of the assembly line, and a memo comes down from front office saying, “oh, by the way, the trunk has to hold 80 square feet and be capable of supporting 4 tons.” Then, when it obviously can’t be done, front office starts looking for people to fire.Another indication that no one was thinking in terms of the ISS accommodating a National Lab is the missing centrifuge. Gravity issues are obviously at the top of the things that could/should be investigated properly in space, yet the planned centrifuge was canceled years into the program. The reason for this was, of course, money and involved no consideration at all for a National “Lab.” And who controls which items get money allocated to them and which items don’t? Time and again, I’ve seen blog posters blame NASA for that. But Congress decides what flies and what dies; even the President is powerless against them. Congress controls the money allocations, all too often at a micro-managed level.The incorporation of NanoRacks into the ISS was a great move, in my opinion, but it is nowhere near enough. There’s only so much you can do in a space the size of a shoe box. Even with the cost explosions typical of a NASA program, I suspect that if they had been planned for and implemented in the ISS from the start, the equivalent of NanoRacks could be available for less than the tens of thousands of dollars (plus transportation and integration charges) that NanoRacks will be charging; and if this is turns out to be a viable experiment method, the break even point on their costs would have been reach reasonably quickly, after which they’re gravy.The ISS, properly designed, could have been (and should have been, I think) the first stop along our route to becoming a spacefaring and multi-planet civilization. Instead, it has been a political football and a fiscal debate, almost from the start. Clinton got the Russians on board by advertising it as an international cooperation program. And although it basically worked out as an international cooperation, his primary reason was actually debt reduction and a way to (theoretically) reduce further US spending on the ISS. That part didn’t work out as planned. (If you look at the spending and debt records for all of the Presidents since the end of WW II, Bill Clinton’s record outshines anybody else’s’; He is, I believe, the only President in that time span to have actually reduced government spending while in office.)Whatever the rationales for what was done and not done on the ISS, clearly it is not what it could have been, what we need, and to this day things show signs of ongoing lack of organization. What really disappoints me is that none of the nonsense was necessary. There are/were many people who could have sat down as early as 1950 (and perhaps even earlier) and worked out the detailed space station requirements for today and a proper implementation program to create and operate it. The only real impediment would have been, is, and probably will continue to be, the politicians. They have the authority to change nearly anything, almost without any accountability.Steve

    • SkyKing_rocketmail says:
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       operating budget… estimated/calculated before the first dollar was spent…essential for coming up with
      meaningful numbers for what ISS would cost

      I think it works more like this:
      NASA gets about 1/2 of 1% of the federal budget because that was the approximate level agreed upon at the end of Apollo. Human space flight gets about half the NASA budget. Everyone else gets to share the other half.

      The human space part is roughly split between the different programs. When there was Shuttle and ISS, each got about half. With Constellation added, Shuttle and ISS were better established and got most and they were carving out as much as possible to send to CX from ISS and Shuttle. Now that its ISS, Orion and SLS, ISS is better established and its budget continues at close to its ‘traditional’ level and the former Shuttle and Constellation is now divided between Orion and SLS.

      The budgets are allocated to the programs. A portion of each program’s budget goes to maintaining the technical infrastructure – the space centers (KSC, JSC, MSFC, WSTF, Michoud), including their facilities and non-program personnel. Headquarters charges a ‘tax’ to support their people. Within each program the budgets are divied up to support their functions. Years ago, most of the technical functions resided in the centers. The programs ‘hired’ particular kinds of experts to get their technical support. There were experts in electrical, thermal, comm, crew systems, EVA and science. Another one of the technical functions was operations, which was itself divided into technical operations functions. But back around 93 the programs started sucking in as many of the technical functions as they could. Organizational functions and responsibilities began to get muddled. The programs didn’t think they needed both a technical R&D infrastructure and operations, which was already divided by systems. So they shrunk the technical organizations. In some cases mission operations began building hardware.

      Payloads some years ago was part of the science organization, and consisted of several hundred people and their contractors, in life sciences, earth and space sciences, and payload projects management and integration. It was a sizable organization, with about 450 people at JSC and another large group in payload operations at MSFC. Previously they were looked upon as ‘the customer’ with the programs providing the required support to conduct missions. But when the programs absorbed the science organization, the lines of customer and provider were not so well defined. A lot of the individual pieces are still around. The former life sciences group is a lot smaller and now mainly focused on human health and flight medicine. There is still a small earth science group doing earth photography cataloging. There is some materials processing at MSFC. There are some small groups at other NASA centers. The ISS Program took over payload integration and science integration, but as part of the program, they compete for resources against the ISS operations and engineering support. So overall, the program budget has remained pretty constant but the emphasis on science and utilization has probably decreased and it became much less synergistic exactly during the time period when the emphasis should have been moving in that direction. I suspect that the hope for CASIS was that they would pick up the slack.

      • dogstar29 says:
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        Good points. ISS is depicted as NASA supporting “customers”. But in reality almost all the “customers” get their money from other NASA programs. It’s really just one hand paying the other.

        For the “National Labs” outside NASA, i.e. NIH, to pay they would have to take the money from other funding. They might do this to some degree if it provides a convenient way to support existing ground-based research while taking credit for collaboration, but it still is not a “new” funding source. For the centrifuge it really isn’t clear how much science benefit there would be, since ground controls are always cheaper and the non-gravity-based effects can be simulated on the ground.

        One effect on NASA has been to emphasize such things as biotech, where there is at least ostensibly an outside customer, though it’s not clear who, and de-emphasize earth and astronomical observation and propulsion and space technology R&D where the product is data simply given away, even though the product might in the latter case be of greater overall importance.

      • Steve Whitfield says:
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        SkyKing_rocketmail,I don’t think we’re talking about the same thing.  You seem to be addressing how the budget pie has been divided and how empire building goes on within NASA, whereas I was talking about the fact that ISS (or any potential program) needs to be evaluated properly beforehand in order to try to determine its true costs and its “value” so as to decide whether it is worth doing.  These evaluations/decisions can’t meaningfully be made without deciding and defining the program output’s functional and performance requirements in detail.  And it just plain doesn’t work trying to change those requirements after the item in question has already been built.Steve

        • SkyKing_rocketmail says:
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           I think we are talking about exactly the same thing. You think someone would be figuring out what different functions require and cost well in advance. I am saying I think it has nothing to do with what’s required, only with how an already established pie gets divided.

  5. DTARS says:
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    I wrote these for Spacex post that I thought would be up today but it applies to what I think we should be doing with ISS as soon as possible.

    4/29/12 Spacex 

    Tomorrow Spacex will test it’s falcon engines and then it is one week till a dragon lifts from the cape on it’s way to ISS.

    I feel like a kid again counting the days to the next NASA space mission. Just like in the old days everything must go right for the space machine to complete it’s tasks.
    There’s risk involved, lots is on the line. 

    I just read where Mr. Bolden said he thinks we will land on mars by 2030. Elon Musk has said much the same thing? I wonder how it will all play out?
     A mystery 🙂

    Questions

    On the last dragon flight did Spacex relight the falcon first stage engines and attempt to turn the booster around??? Did they get it turned? My guess is that they got it going in the other direction only to run out of fuel before getting it slow enough.

    What are their first stage recovery testing plans for this flight?

    How soon do they plan to put a draco on the booster to flip it faster? (I forgot the name of that flip maneuver?)

    I was just looking at the pictures of Spacex mating dragon to the falcon boosters and wondering if it were possible (in the future) to fly dragons second stage, trunk, and dragon close to ISS. Separate trunk and dragon for ISS docking, then have dragon put the trunk back on the second stage before reentering earths atmosphere leaving a spacecraft in Leo that just needs fuel and a dragon trunk mission. What would be needed to make that possible???? 

    Anyway, from his comments it seems Mr. Bolden realizes Spacex is the critical path to mars and that NASA should play an NACA type supporting role.

    Lol about time! lol

    Curious George  

    Out!!!!!!

    Cancel SLS

    Cancel Orion

    We need money to go to mars!!!

  6. DTARS says:
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    4/30/12 Spacex
    I was just looking at the pictures of Spacex mating dragon to the falcon boosters and wondering if it were possible (in the future) to fly dragons second stage, trunk, and dragon close to ISS. Separate trunk and dragon for ISS docking, then have dragon put the trunk back on the second stage before reentering earths atmosphere leaving a spacecraft in Leo that just needs fuel and a dragon trunk mission. What would be needed to make that possible???? 

    Isn’t using falcon 2nd stages with dragon trunks the cheapest way to create robot capability in   LEO now??? Shouldn’t NASA or Spacex be designing now, a Leo junk/fuel depot beam to be flow on a falcon heavy soon. 

    Dragon trunk missions 

    Deorbit and salvage or rescue satellites for Earth. Clean up our Leo construction site!

    Just as Mr. C said, robots first (falcon 2nd stage plus trunk) humans next. Just add a dragon capsule and let’s pickup in LEO where we left off with the Gemini program. 

    Where is the Bigelow garage so ISS crew can help repair, test, and rescue satellites and future vehicles.

    Where is the ISS Bigelow greenhouse to drive down the cost of feeding humans.

    With this first Spacex mission lets use it to start planning smart programs that build infrastructure

    Inner Solar System Railroad  Inc.

    Your space transportation provider.
     
    ME! Isn’t this the solution to being able to save an important mission like the Mars Grunt mission the Russians just lost in the very near future???