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Using ISS: Old Excuses and New Excuses

By Keith Cowing
NASA Watch
April 15, 2012
Filed under , ,

Doubts linger about space station’s science potential, Orlando Sentinel
“It’s the tip of the iceberg,” said Marybeth Edeen, NASA manager of the station’s national laboratory. The inability to completely fill NASA’s science racks, she said, is simply one of priorities. Up until now, NASA has been more focused on building the station. Indeed, the station crew — which expanded from three to six members in 2009 — now spends about 50 hours a week on science, as opposed to just three hours a week in 2008. “Our goal is to get the racks fully utilized,” she said. To help do that, NASA hired a nonprofit group last summer called the Center for the Advancement of Science in Space (CASIS) to manage the national lab and find new experiments.
Keith’s note: NASA has had well over a decade to figure out how to fully utilize the ISS. And yet they haven’t done so. The ISS was declared “complete” some time ago. So … what is the hold up?

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

16 responses to “Using ISS: Old Excuses and New Excuses”

  1. richard schumacher says:
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    What science potential?  It vibrates too much for real microgravity work and is too expensive for, well, anything.  Its only real role was as a diplomatic tool, and that’s over unless we invite China to participate.

    • npng says:
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      It vibrates too much?  What kind of microgravity work are you defining to be “real”?  Be specific.  Crystal growth?  Biological processes? 

      It’s too expensive for everything?  Have you analyzed every business case that ever existed or will exist?   Your global generalizations and categorical conclusions that the ISS is worthless come with no basis.  You are just “baffling us with bullshit”.   What science expertise or business analysis skills do you have?  Any?  

      While you’re at it, why don’t you come clean and tell us what your hidden agendas in bashing the ISS are.   And Richard, any fool can criticize the use of an asset.  If you’re so brilliant about all of this why don’t you provide a productive use and a defendable business case? 

      • Jerry_Browner says:
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        “why don’t you provide a productive use and a defendable business case?”

        There have been a myriad of productive uses for space stations identified since the first concepts of stations almost a hundred years ago. I doubt most of the NASA people are aware of most of these.

        It is hard to come up with a defendable business case when the paperwork and cert processes are so expensive, time consuming.  and changing. One of the great ISS successes has been the nanorack people who have limited crew interaction and size and enclosed the payloads in nearly fully self contained blocks in order to mitigate the design and cert issues and then reduced the integration process to where a payload can fly in a matter of months. The typical NASA process has been 3-7 years. Because of NASA priorities the payload you start on and spend tens or hundreds of millions on may never fly. Its kind of difficult to justify that level of business risk. AntiMagnetic Spectrometer was a top priority US and multinational effort that was scheduled for flight and attachment on ISS in the 1990s. It did finally make it into orbit on one of the last Shuttle missions after being kicked out of the program entirely for a time.

  2. Littrow says:
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    It vibrates too much?

    Not really; it is not an issue for 95% of experiments or payloads. Most are not that sensitive. And if they are sensitive there are devices such as the Canadian electromagnetically levitating Microgravity Isolation Mount, or the US treadmill based Vibration Isolation System that could dampen vibrations between payloads and structure.

    That said there is much more to the story.

    NASA has been flying research experiments on manned spacecraft since Apollo.
    It began in earnest on Shuttle in the early 1980s and grew to a crescendo with the Spacelab and Spacehab science missions throughout the 1990s. Offshoots of many of these flew on Mir. Some of the payloads were commercially developed. Many were developed by academia under NASA grants that would go to universities and pay for professors and graduate students.

    NASA made some changes beginning in the mid-90s.

    NASA decided in many cases that university science researchers and educational programs were competing and that NASA’s own researchers needed support more than universities. So NASA began to squeeze the resources for university science and for educational experiments. There were also internal NASA turf battles. The life sciences people did their best to squeeze out the earth and space sciences people.

    When Constellation came in, NASA decided that NASA needed the science money for itself and its hardware contractors and besides why should NASA pay for scientific research when there are places like National Institutes of Health or the National Academies that could foot the science bill. So NASA research grants to academia were cut back even more. Within NASA many of the premier payload systems like the Biotechnology rack were cancelled.

    NASA was turning off the faucet for developing science and simultaneously curtailing the development and support of researchers interested in conducting science experiments in space.

    ISS management back in the 90s and first few years of the last decade decided they did not need the people, processes or payloads from Shuttle, Spacehab or Mir, so they started the entire mission integration and experiment development process over again. Basically they were reinventing the wheel. Almost none of the people in the ISS payloads organization had ever worked payload integration or research on any other program. So they didn’t know what they didn’t know and started the forty year history of science on manned space missions over again. They started working to develop the new processes some time ago but not a lot of attention was placed on it (what Ms. Edeen referred to) so multi-year convoluted integration processes were the norm.

    Then there are operational issues. Without Shuttle, there is no way to return virtually anything. Essentially you are limited just to data downlink. Even with Shuttle, pre-launch, late access, and services during launch and the days before docking which have always been critical for life sciences, have always been seriously constrained. Without Shuttle these services are almost nonexistent. Maybe some of that will begin to change once commercial systems come on line.

    So just as the crew grew to six, EVA and assembly ops went away, crew time became available, and the number of payloads is significantly reduced.

  3. Jonna31 says:
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    Up to now? It’s 2012. The things been effectively built for years….a “goal” of getting it fully utilize should have happened four years ago and should have taken maybe six months to figure out.

    The ISS’ real achievement was its construction. That was a real, four star, historic engineering triumph. NASA can build big things in space. No longer hypothetical… it knows how to do it and has done it. From that point of view the station is completely worth it.

  4. Al Jackson says:
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    If no other science experiment were aboard the ISS would not the human biology of long duration space flight have been an achievement in knowledge worth it’s weight in gold?

    • Anonymous says:
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      It, the biology, would seem to be worth it, but how the ISS is being used looks strange and what a researcher has to go through to get to the ISS looks complex. 

      As a researcher wanting to put science on the ISS, how many layers do I need to go through?   If I call NanoRacks, do I make arrangements with them?  But then doesn’t Nanoracks have to go to CASIS to get to the ISS?  And then doesn’t CASIS have to go to NASA to get on the payload on some launch manifest?  The layers and layers of middle men and management and re-management look difficult to deal with, time consuming and expensive.  How much does a researcher have to pay to these groups to get to the ISS?   I can’t find a streamlined plan that gives instructions on how to get through this bureaucracy.  Do these organizations have instructions?  How many lawyers do I need?  How much money do I need to give these management people?  How many years before I can fly?  What do they take from me when I do this? 

  5. Littrow says:
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    Human life science is definitely important if we hope to one day send people beyond earth. There might even be some value for earth-based health applications if we get some people to actually use and apply the science. But ISS is offering little new beyond what was done on Mir and the Salyuts before them. Mir and Salyuts had crew staying up there a lot longer. The US is taking more data, though until commercial return starts there is little capability to recover samples. The crew is not really being subject to anything new or different, including no longer duration missions. The Russians have held a 15 month record for decades.

  6. Craig Kenneth Bryant says:
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    There’s an obvious answer here, if we can all put down our Captain Video decoder rings for a minute and confront some hard truths: there just isn’t much worthwhile science to do up there.  Not at these prices, anyway.  I’ve spent most of my life hearing about crystals and ball bearings and what have you, and you know what?  I think we’ve got a pretty good handle on the whole bumblebees-in-microgravity business. 

    It’s been clear to me since Brian Burrough’s book “Dragonfly: NASA and the Crisis Aboard Mir” that all this space science is pretty much a sham.  NASA paid to build out Mir to support political and diplomatic goals–including some very worthwhile ones around non-proliferation–and then they had to scramble to do something, _anything_, with these new laboratories.  Re-fly experiments you’ve already done!  Grow some more damn crystals!  “Looking at stars, peeing in jars,” as the astronauts say.  ISS is just the second verse.

    The only things ISS can teach us about are how to build, maintain, and operate structures in space for extended times.  These are good things to know!  And once you recognize that and take it on board, you start to ask the really valuable questions about how to use ISS.  Once you get past this “national laboratory” nonsense, you start to see ISS as the once in a lifetime, irreplacable engineering testbed for a Mars mission.  Everything NASA does up there should be focused on that goal.

    • Littrow says:
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      I am not so quick to dismiss ISS’s usefulness as a laboratory. I agree, one of its uses should be to help develop the next generation planetary spacecraft. If we do not do that, then we are making the same mistake we did with Shuttle of not going to the next advancement.
       
      However the station that became ISS was established and designed around being a modular laboratory that is adaptable for multiple purposes. Even on a planetary spacecraft the astronauts need something useful to keep them busy while they are enroute. At least now the astronauts can look out the windows and take pictures. There is damn little to see going to and from Mars.

      The US has led the world in the past in conducting basic research; that is non-applied research in which there is no specific goal beyond learning something new. In the mid-80s, NASA researched which companies, which divisions, who were the likely researchers. We signed some companies up to do research on Shuttle. Then Challenger happened.

      There are companies and researchers and schools out there that want to do research. But they do not have the tens or hundreds of millions of dollars to pay for access and they do not have the 3, 5 or 7 years or longer to figure out how to work their way through the NASA bureaucracy. Graduate students generally have a year or two in which to figure out the experiment, fly it, and get the data. University professors won’t go much longer than that usually. Companies generally will not put any more time than that into a basic research experiment unless there is a specific product in mind that promises a return on the dollar. Universities and graduate students need sponsorship from somewhere, whether its government or private donations and grants.

      NASA has not seriously thought out the things it needs to do in order to make use of ISS attractive for researchers, at least not in recent years (or decades). There are NASA people who have done it in the past but they are not working on ISS today. NASA needs to figure out a far more streamlined process. NASA needs to help line up sponsorship. If researchers need assistance building space-qualified hardware, NASA needs to line that up that support. Its tough for NASA to do when even NASA cannot build and space-qualify hardware of its own on a reasonable schedule or for reasonable cost. Quick, ready, frequent access getting things to ISS needs to be established and so does return of hardware and samples from ISS.

      If NASA doesn’t provide these things, then no one will be clamoring to do research on ISS.

      • Anonymous says:
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        LIttrow     I agree with you NASA needs to make the ISS attractive for researchers although from press articles it looks like others should too or more.

        In http://www.spaceflorida.gov… it says Space Florida headed by Frank DiBello won the CASIS award for running the ISS.   Does CASIS run the ISS or Space Florida or do both of them?   Didn’t NASA run the ISS for awhile?   Can NASA give the ISS to a State?  Apparently so.   It looks like DiBello is the Chairman of CASIS AND the President of Space Florida.   Does anybody here know what this means?    

        Is the International Space Station pretty much a Florida laboratory?   Is everyone at Space Fl and CASIS a Florida resident? Is the ISS a National Laboratory or a Florida State laboratory?   

        There is a Board notice that shows a Dr. Yeatman has been added, from Tampa, so we have a surgeon run ISS. Then, an Alan Stern, which seems strange since he’s written to be a planetary scientist and planets are quite far away from the ISS, although he’s closer, in Louisiana.  It looks like the ISS used to be run by NASA for the whole country, but now it’s owned by Florida.  Very confusing. 

        If the State of Florida won the ISS work then this Chairman DiBello must be in charge of it all.  Maybe not though.  He is listed as something interim somewhere.  DiBello must need to get a lot of Science and Corporate Board members to grow the CASIS and use the ISS more and more.   It looks like DiBello is powerful and can find executives in Florida he knows and find big investment money for the CASIS too, so the State of Florida can add lots of jobs and be strongest and in control of all of the use of the ISS.  This would be a great victory for Florida. 

        This Florida Space and the CASIS win too should give stars for Bolden in NASA and these Carroll Scott Nelson politicos in Florida and help us win for Obama this Fall too, a great win for all.

        So Littrow, the ISS use by NASA looks past and now it looks like its BiDello and Florida that own ISS and have a powerful job to make science work up there.  Florida Rules!

        • Littrow says:
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          DickSteele – I suspect you hit it about right – CASIS was selected by Mr. Obama because he wanted jobs in Florida in order to get a return at the polls in November. There was no logic in creating a new company and organization with people inexperienced and unknowledgeable about the issues associated with operating an ISS. However do not make the mistake of thinking that CASIS now owns or operates ISS. CASIS is a marketing front organization.  NASA under Mary Beth Edeen and her payloads organization is still firmly in charge of the integration and operations process. They need to clean these processes up otherwise CASIS will not have a sales and marketing strategy. 

          • Anonymous says:
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            Littrow   CASIS is a front organization!*?  Just a ruse?  Explains a lot.  Then Obama had Bolden had this guy Sufferdini and Edeen to secretly run ISS even though CASIS was fronted or is this still wrong or different?  No explanation of this anywhere.  No wonder NASA doesn’t care about CASIS strange issues and resignation things for a year.  Still confusing.  If CASIS is front now then it is useless after election?   If this Edene markets Nanofracks no front is needed for NASA and NASA has all of ISS still right Litrow?

          • Littrow says:
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            Space Station is getting a ~$3 billion budget. Roughly speaking that translates to about 20000 people.  CASIS has a $15million budget. We’ve heard its about 20 people. $15million should compute to around 100 people. Maybe the extra dollars are used for marketing or development? Any way you look at it its not comparable to the money going direct to ISS.

  7. ed2291 says:
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    When I was in the Navy on a ship underway 70 hour weeks were routine and 60 hour weeks were gravy. So now after all this time we have 6 astronauts to do 50 hours of science a week?  There may be a good reason for that, but NASA needs to clearly explain and justify it. Keith is correct in saying often NASA is its own worse enemy.