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Commercialization

Selling a Space Station That Takes Too Long To Use

By Keith Cowing
NASA Watch
May 9, 2012
Filed under , , ,

‘Made in Space’: Coming soon to a product near you, Reuters
“Uhran notes that the timescale of a typical [Space station] research project is three to five years, which doesn’t easily mesh with corporate priorities like reaching sales or profit targets for the next quarter, or even the next year.”
Keith’s note: So … what do Mark Uhran and his colleagues do about this issue (by no means a new one)? They simply repeat it again and again as if it were an absolute, immutable fact of life at NASA and that there is nothing that NASA can (or will) do to change it. And then they wonder why there is not more interest in the commercial use of the ISS. Baffling. If the time lag is too long for commercial interests then obviously NASA needs to shorten it. Is CASIS the black box within which that miracle is supposed to happen? This commercially naive mindset at NASA is an ongoing example of the strange approach that Uhran et al took back in the 1990s with regard to finding users for the space station i.e. “build it and they will come”. Yes they actually used that phrase. So did I when I worked there.
OK, Mark: you’ve built it – so where is everyone?

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

11 responses to “Selling a Space Station That Takes Too Long To Use”

  1. Jerry_Browner says:
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    Spacehab, Mir and Nanocube all take (took) a lot shorter, in many cases less than a year, and many payloads went through the entire development, test, cert and safety process. Where are those people now?

  2. Nox Anonymous says:
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    I would argue that in general capitalism, corporations, and the US government are too short sighted. I agree with Jerry_Browner however, there should be a fast track way to make and get Flight experiments up to the ISS quicker then a 3-5 year typical.

    If it’s not mission critical and it won’t impact safety critical ISS systems – give it a fast track (assuming the funding is there).

    • chriswilson68 says:
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      “I would argue that in general capitalism, corporations, and the US government are too short sighted.”

      And yet, somehow, a huge percentage of the innovations of every decade of the last hundred years have come from the United States.  They have come from government-sponsored academic research, corporate research labs, individuals, and start-up companies directly pursuing products.

      Capitalism, corporations, and the U.S. government must be doing something right — or at least a lot better than everyone else on the planet.

  3. 2814graham says:
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    I don’t foresee any improvements coming. Keith and others can scream to the wind all they want, but I have not seen any substantial changes in 20 years. Uhran as he says is frustrated. He is frustrated because he knows better is possible and yet he has no control, no authority. Money flows from Congress to the program. The program manager, effectively Gerstenmaier, has the control and authority and yet seems fearful of making changes. Uhran taxes a small amount of money to support his Headquarters staff, but has no technical role and no recent experience.

    The organizations that did payload integration in the past are long gone. Mir and Spacehab were managed out of JSC Space and Life Sciences. That directorate no longer exists. The organization was dismembered by people inside of it, and by the ISS Program which was fearful of it. Every now and then they put someone into management that someone thinks had a role back in the SLSD days. They recently put someone who had been part of the NASA-Mir Phase I Program Office into ISS Payload Integration in the hope she would use her experiences to expedite the process. The NASA Mir Phase I Program Office never had any role in Mir payload integration.

    There is no one, not even a single individual, who had a role in payload integration in any program prior to ISS, in the ISS payloads and utilization office today. No one in a position of authority today knows what would be possible or how to make it happen.

    • Littrow says:
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      There was only one NASA person responsible for setting up the Mir integration process.  Before that he did Spacehab, and before that middeck. He had a lot of contractor assistants, but I think you’re right; I don’t think any of them made it into ISS payloads and utilization.

    • npng says:
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      graham,

      It’s good to see your summary, it gets to the point, although I’m sure you know your comments are just the tip of the problem-iceberg.  I applaud your specificity, naming names and not just groups, so readers can clearly see who is individually accountable for decisions, actions, and inactions. I hope you post more on the facts and circumstances.

      If the status quo holds, I agree, it’s doubtful improvements will come. More likely dysfunction and erosion will continue.  Keith’s screaming in to the wind might improve some if he can gain better access to current situations and details. Keith is seriously out-of-date on his Mark Uhran comments, Gerstenmaier is the centerpiece surrounded by NASA lawyers, the agendas of center directors, and the union.

      We all can see the plays on the field, but we rarely get to hear the plans made and motives cast in-the-huddle, and there are plenty of them.   You need to add in how the 9th floor is behaving – meaning Charlie Bolden, Laurie Garver, and particularly the NASA lawyers, name by name.  Add in the influence of the Union and of academia and the aerospace industry. Add in the actions of Congress, Appropriations, OSTP and OMB too, name by name.  For every visible agenda, there are usually three or more hidden agendas.  Too often, individuals attempt to escape accountability by hiding in groups “It was a HQ decision”, “it was a Union initiative”, “It was a Congressional action”, “It was an NRC position”, and so on.  Government designs itself so decisions are made by committees and individuals can avoid individual accountability. 

      Your comments on payload integration are valid, but ISS utilization overall is the elephant in the room.  Your last sentence sums it up: “No one in a position of authority today knows what would be possible or how to make it happen.”  There are maybe half a dozen folks that do know how, but none of them are in a position to make it happen.

      In WIkipedia, for what that’s worth – errata or not, ISS Program costs are listed.  With a six man ISS crew at $7.5 million for each person-day each day of ISS operation costs $45 million, each month $1.3 billion U.S. taxpayer dollars and yet all Congress and NASA can see fit to fund ISS utilization is for $15 million per year (1/3 of a day of costs).  The fiscal irresponsibility in that is beyond comprehension.   We throw a man in jail for stealing a loaf of bread, but when groups in DC waste billions a year, it’s just another happy day in Washington D.C.

      • 2814graham says:
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        “There are maybe half a dozen folks that do know how, but none of them are in a position to make it happen.”

        Within NASA, probably not half a dozen-maybe 2 or 3. But they’ve not been working in payload integration since the Mir time-frame.

    • kcowing says:
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      Someone needs to scream 😉

  4. Frank Schowengerdt says:
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    As Mark Uhran and I both know well, NASA had a great program for flying commercial payloads on Shuttle and ISS from the late 80s to the early 00s.  The program was first called Centers for Commercial Development of Space, then Commercial Space Centers, then Space Product Development, and lastly, Research Partnership Centers.  The convoluted history of the name itself, which is indicative of the constant reorganization, says something about the way NASA treated the program.  But in reality, it was a huge success.  

    The 15 or so centers, located at universities around the country, worked with their industrial partners to fly over 150 payloads, at a cost roughly 10% of NASA’s for the same hardware, publishing far more papers than comparable NASA-only programs, and filing many more patents.  Several of these centers still exist (BioServe in Colorado and the Center for Biophysical Science and Engineering in Alabama, for example) and regularly fly payloads on ISS.  A center that I founded at Colorado School of Mines, the Center for Commercial Applications of Combustion in Space, was instrumental in placing a major express rack hardware system, Space-DRUMS, on ISS  That payload is still on orbit.  

    Mark ran this commercialization program at headquarters from about 2000 to 2003.  I ran it from 2003 to 2006.  The program was finally killed in 2006, largely because it represented a threat to flight programs at the field centers and because certain individuals at headquarters wanted the money for other purposes.  

    In many respects, though, it was the best effort the U.S. government ever made to commercialize space.

    • npng says:
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      An interesting story Frank, but the way you describe things you provoke many questions.  Why did NASA treat the Research Partnership Centers program so badly?  And NASA can’t treat, so it means specific people in NASA did the treating, who were they?  Why specifically was the program a success, in what respects?  Who by name killed the program in 2006?  What other purposes did the money go to? 

      It becomes tedious and nauseating over years to hear that this group, or that agency, or this center, did X or Y or Z and that those actions were poor, manipulative, or simply corrupt.  Agencies don’t do things, people do things and accountability always comes down to a specific individual or individuals.  People that do things right have nothing to hide and consequently they tend to be fully open in their actions. People that have secret agendas or are acting for personal gain or to grab power and control tend to hide in groups and behave covertly.