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One More Reason Not To Use the ISS?

By Keith Cowing
NASA Watch
January 14, 2013
Filed under , , ,

How to Solve Protein Structures with an X-ray Laser, Science (subscription required)
“For over a decade, biologists have asked whether x-ray lasers can be used to determine the structures of biomolecules such as proteins. Such methods have the potential to allow structure determination from micro- or even nanoscale crystals, but radiation damage can be extensive and data interpretation is fraught with difficulty. On page 227 of this issue, Redecke et al. (1) overcome these problems to determine the room-temperature structure of a protein of importance to drug discovery.”
Advanced Protein Crystallization Facility (APCF), NASA
“The three-dimensional structure of protein crystals is studied to determine how structure affects the function of individual proteins. Scientists want to understand how proteins work, how to build them from scratch, or how to improve them. To conduct this type of study, scientists must first generate crystals that are large enough and uniform enough to provide useful structural information upon analysis. Protein crystals grown in microgravity — the near weightlessness experienced on a spacecraft in orbit — are often significantly larger and of better quality than those grown on Earth.”
Keith’s note: Once again, yet another research team has demonstrated that structural information for biomolecules can be obtained from vanishingly small biological samples using a X-ray laser – on Earth – no space station required. So much for the official story NASA has told for 20 years that the ISS is crucial for such work. If NASA hadn’t dragged its feet for the past several decades perhaps the agency could have made more progress before Earth-based research caught up and passed them by. You can be certain that CASIS won’t be linking to this research.
This doesn’t mean that the ISS has no value as a research platform – quite the opposite. What NASA needs to do, however, is get off its collective butt and adopt a research cycle for ISS research – from start to finish – that is commensurate with what happens back on Earth. Otherwise more of the “discoveries” made up there will arrive back on Earth after they have been done ‘faster, better, and cheaper’ back on Earth.
Using the ISS: Once Again NASA Has Been Left in the Dust, earlier post

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

24 responses to “One More Reason Not To Use the ISS?”

  1. ed2291 says:
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    Last time I heard, NASA said the ISS did fifty hours of research  a week. Six people for 50 hours a week after assembly is complete? Really? In the Navy I never had a week underway where I did not do more than fifty hours a week.

    Keith’s words bear repeating. “What NASA needs to do, however, is get off its collective butt and adopt
    a research cycle for ISS research – from start to finish – that is
    commensurate with what happens back on Earth.”

    • Helen Simpson says:
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      Let’s be careful here. There is a fundamental difference between hours of research done, and hours that astronauts spend doing research. The fifty hours you refer to is, I’m pretty sure, the latter. But a lot of the research being done on ISS is remotely controlled and monitored. To a large degree, the astronauts aren’t there to “do” the research, but just to keep the autonomous or remotely controlled research stations running. They’re caretakers, not researchers. The many hours that the astronauts aren’t “doing research”, they’re keeping the physical plant alive to allow the research to happen. There are vastly more researchers on the ground doing full time research on ISS than there are astronauts on ISS.

      What NASA needs to do is to get off its collective butt and make sure that more ISS experiments can, indeed, be done remotely, thereby freeing up in situ humans to do things you really need in situ humans to do, keep the number of in situ humans to an affordable minimum, and to maximize the amount of science performed. Our technological advancements now allow us to do things in this way. That wasn’t the case a few decades ago when ISS was first conceived.

      In the Navy, humans are cheap, and communication can be hard. So tasks that might otherwise be done remotely are handed to humans. Mopping decks, for example.

      • ed2291 says:
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         “To a large degree, the astronauts aren’t there to “do” the research, but
        just to keep the autonomous or remotely controlled research stations
        running. They’re caretakers, not researchers. The many hours that the
        astronauts aren’t “doing research”, they’re keeping the physical plant
        alive to allow the research to happen.”

        Ignoring the insult about mopping decks, the question remains, if they are not doing research, why the hell are they there? Are they “spam in a can” as the early astronauts used to say? It takes 6 people to be caretakers? Really? With today’s technology? Are they mopping floors on the ISS? How do we send satelites out for years without humans on them?

        The ISS remains very expensive and is at the cost of other projects – both manned and unmanned. The ISS should now be at the peak of usability after 14 years of assembly. It is legitimate for taxpayers – even space enthusiastic tax payers as Keith and I are – to ask NASA what the hell they are doing and to justify costs.  Practicing for a six month flight to Mars mission is not a sufficient answer. I am not anti-ISS, but I am increasingly skeptical.

        • Helen Simpson says:
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          No insult intended. The Navy needs people to mop decks. You may not have ever gotten that assignment.

          “It takes 6 people to be caretakers? Really?” Evidently yes. Sadly enough. “How do we send satellites out for years without humans on them?” Because there are no humans on them! A lot of what the astronauts do is maintain the infrastructure that supports humans. That’s mostly why the hell they’re there. If they weren’t there, support of the facility would involve a lot fewer tasks.

          But they aren’t just custodians. An experiment may need a few minutes of a dexterous hand and a sharp eye to keep it functioning 24/7. But the price for those few minutes of dexterity and sharp vision is considerable. You need to keep the astronauts alive 24/7 in order for them to give those experiments the few minutes of attention they need.

          My point was simple. You can criticize ISS for not doing enough science but, given the way ISS was built, you can’t criticize the astronauts there for not doing enough science. That’s what you were doing.

          ISS was conceived in an era when research could only be done by humans in situ. That’s not true anymore. ISS technology has outgrown that premise. So the reason ISS doesn’t have a larger astronaut complement is at least partly that we don’t need as many people there as we thought we would need to do the science we wanted to do. That’s not to say that NASA has completely bought into that premise, but it’s correct. If you’re not impressed with the science that ISS is doing, the reason isn’t that the astronauts aren’t working hard enough. You can still quite fairly ask NASA what the hell the agency is doing, and why the science from ISS isn’t impressive enough.

          • Jafafa Hots says:
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            Maybe it’s just me, but it hardly seems that ed2291 was complaining that astronauts are lazy.Getting that impression would almost require a deliberate missing of the point, I think.

  2. zolensky says:
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    A close reading of the entire article will reveal to you that this technique is only applicable to a subset of crystals, because of rapid beam damage to the crystals (even with the femtosecond pulses), and only for sub-micron sized ones at that.  This is not a generally applicable techinque.

    • Anonymous says:
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       The technique rapidly damages (read: explodes) the microcrystals, but I don’t see why that would otherwise constrain which proteins can be handled.  The use of extremely small crystals is a feature, not a bug.

  3. dogstar29 says:
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    X-ray diffraction of proteins is still useful for research in some cases, but it is applicable only to proteins which form regular crystals, which is a limited subset, and although research organizations such as NIH still use it, in general the pharmaceutical industry does not. The tool which has effectively replaced it in industry is actually computational chemistry, which is advancing far more rapidly and is more robust in application. The major pharmaceutical companies have proprietary CC systems that can go directly from a gene sequence to a final folded protein structure. They are not interested in using ISS unless NASA is paying the bills.

    The real promise of ISS is in space-based observation of the Earth and space, and the assembly and servicing of satellites and spacecraft.

    • Jim Kelly says:
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       I almost missed it myself, but this isn’t just X-ray *diffraction* (which celebrated its centennial last year). It’s X-ray *laser* diffraction, which allows the imaging of much smaller crystals than those used for conventional X-ray diffraction. Smaller crystals can be made from a much wider assortment of proteins, which is a big deal.

    • Ed Well says:
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      About 25% of proteins that can be expressed in a soluble form go on to produce crystals and structures. For a whole class, membrane proteins (important drug targets), crystallization is very difficult. Crystallization and from it crystallography represents 80-90% of our current structural knowledge of biological macromolecules. Unfortunately not even major pharma has software that can go from primary sequence to tertiary structure. Major pharm still strongly invests in crystallography, e.g. the IMCA beamline at the Advanced Photon Source in Chicago and multiple in-house crystallography groups. The X-ray free electron laser offers an amazing capability to study smaller crystals (on the order of microns) which turn out to be more common than larger ones. However, there is only a single facility currently operational and despite the improved speed and orders of magnitude more intensity many days are currently spent on each project. There will be more facilities and experiments will become more efficient but science typically moves forward on several fronts. Crystals grown in a reduced acceleration environment are larger and more perfect. This improves data quality with the appropiate instrumentation. However at the scale of molecules Brownian motion is a strong force and the ISS will help a few studies but not all. The trick becomes getting the knowledge so that the correct tool can be applied to the appropiate problem. We don’t have a single saw in the workshop.

      • dogstar29 says:
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        I was just repeating what I had been told by the head of a major pharmaceutical company research department (not one of the IMCA members). However I am curious; are there currently any commercial customers that are paying the full cost of an ISS crystallization payload, i.e. without government funding?

      • npng says:
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        I like your summary Ed.  It matches what we’ve concluded regarding PCG: not a single saw in the workshop, several are required.  Some PCG is workable on the ground, some will still benefit from development on the ISS.

        As for vulture’s question below, we’re not aware of a single commercial firm that has full paid a PCG payload or anything near it of note.  Their lack of ISS use and PCG pursuit though has generally been due to other issues and constraints or simply from a lack of understanding or awareness of what is available.

    • G. says:
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       The ISS is not in a good orbit for global Earth observations, nor is a good, clean, and stable platform.  However, its cost could be limiting what can be done for Earth and Space observations.

      • dogstar29 says:
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        The ISS passes over essentially the entire inhabited area of the earth and can obliquely observe even the poles. Earth sensors do not require extreme stability and are not overly susceptible to contamination. Access by the crew to quickly repair, modify and update payloads and regular logistics flights can vastly reduce launch and servicing costs. Astronomical sensors that require extreme freedom from can be assembled inside a lightwieight unpressurized “hangar” (originally proposed back in ’78 or so), operated in co-orbits and returned to ISS for servicing. 

  4. Littrow says:
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    I have no doubt there is no shortage of researchers out there who would use ISS if it were not too time consuming, difficult and expensive to make it through the integration and safety process. Aside from some streamlining in the process for very small and simple payloads with limited on-orbit access, the long difficult and expensive process makes it too difficult to use and precludes most PIs. They should have fixed the situation years ago. They are wasting billions of dollars.

    • Denniswingo says:
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      I have no doubt there is no shortage of researchers out there who would use ISS if it were not too time consuming, difficult and expensive to make it through the integration and safety process.

      Send em our way.  We know how to do all of the above to allow researchers to focus on their work.

      • Littrow says:
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        The top problem is the 3-5 year process. It needs to be well under 2 years.
        The next problem is the overhead of paper and the non-standardized science equipment that has to be designed/invented/built/certified. There is no shortage of people like yourself to “help”, in fact there are probably a few too many helpers that will get in the way. But if the time is not shortened considerably and the equipment standardized and readied for very quick use then not much else matters. ‘Another issue that maybe Space-X will get us over is getting regular launch and landing capability back. 

        One other challenge is funding for the PIs. NASA is the second largest federal government organization funding science in academia. The only one bigger is the NSF. That money needs to find its way to PIs who want to develop and fly experiments.

        • Ralphy999 says:
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          Don’t forget the National Institutes of Health which IIRC, has a budget bigger than NASA and NSF combined.

        • Denniswingo says:
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          The top problem is the 3-5 year process. It needs to be well under 2 years.

          This is a fallacy, not true at all anymore.  When we sent our first payload to ISS (admittedly a simple one), from the signing of the contract until flight was seven weeks. There are far more ways of flying payloads than what you think.

  5. Anonymous says:
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    Forget X-ray lasers; it’s been discovered how to suppress convection during protein crystallization right down here on Earth: just grow the crystal at the top of the container, so the less-dense depletion zone is on top.

    “High Resolution Protein Crystals Using an Efficient Convection-Free Geometry”

     http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs
     http://www.ru.nl/english/@8

    • dogstar29 says:
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      It appears to me that most microgravity materials processing applications face competition from ground-based processes that can accomplish similar objectives at lower cost. As an example, the continuous flow electrophoresis system (CEFES) that flew several times on Shuttle and was proposed for large-scale manufacturing in space was largely supplanted by preparative (large-scale) liquid chromatography. Recently Bio-Rad has marketed a preparative electrophoresis system (for about $2500) which uses what is essentially a clinostat, or continuous slow rotation about a horizontal axis, to keep proteins and similar large molecules suspended in liquid under normal gravity and accomplish the same thing. 

      This isn’t to put down spaceflight, which I have worked for all my life, but I think we need to recognize that without efficient, low cost access to space, particularly for human flight, spaceflight is not competitive with alternative ground-based methods even if microgravity offers theoretical advantages, as it does for protein crystallization. It’s time to stop looking for a mission of infinite value and start offering efficient access at a competitive cost.

      • npng says:
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        vulture, one point on the clinostat mentioned in your post.  A clinostat, of which there are several varieties, is basically a glorified rock tumbler.  Think like a little cell riding a ferris wheel.  Weightless on the downside of the wheel rotation and 2g’s on the upside.  Gravity (g) is still fully there, the weight vector is simply changing direction constantly.  And then there is the variety that rotates down slowly and up “really quick”, kind of funny. Go up really fast and the cell won’t notice!  That clinostats and RWV’s (rotating wall vessels) rotate, simply makes the cellular contents experience shear forces and rubbing and friction.  Think shiny rocks.  Anyone that uses a clinostat and thinks it’s making their research trip to the ISS unnecessary, is clueless about the fundamentals of weight, weightlessness and gravity.  That said, 1000’s and 1000’s of clinostats and RWV’s have been made and sold and bought by researchers. (I shoulda bought stock in them.)  A fool (or money poor researcher) is born every minute. 
        One of the funniest presentations I’ve seen given on clinostats was one where cancer cells were put into a rotating vessel for a time.  They took them out and analyzed them, fluoresced them, took micro-photos and observed all of the amazing cell surface changes and erosion and damage.  Their declaration was “Look what happens to the cancer cells in (artificial) microgravity!  This will surely lead to a breakthrough and cure!” A truly laugh out loud moment – hours of shear and cell surface abrasion – and they declared their research and observations of cell changes to be micro-gravity produced.  Nonsense.  

        To the researchers I’d say: Cop a clue and realize the ISS is the ONLY existing manned lab place you can really process in weightlessness, otherwise I hope you have fun rubbing your rocks together in those clinostats.

        • Anonymous says:
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           Most clinostats operate in “slow rotation” mode where centrifugal force is negligible.

          Anyway, the point he was making was that workable substitutes, not equivalents, exist for many of the putative “killer apps” of microgravity.

  6. EdwardM says:
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    The real (but unstated)  purpose of the ISS was to provide missions for the shuttle. There never were any experiments requiring zero G that drove either the necesstity of a space station or its design. Actually a secondary purpose was to provide a platform for launching a mission to Mars; but this had to be abandoned when the ISS needed to be down-sized because the cost was too high. This is not to say that no science of value came from this platform, but the solution was put into place before the problem was identified. It would be interesting to do a study to determine whether the benefits derived from the ISS justified its cost. Maintaining the NSTS drove NASA since the 1960s. Now that it is dead it may be a good time for the agency to determine how its resources can best be used for the advancement of science. The real contributions NASA has made to science ranged from its program investigating the environment of our earth to space probes providing information on our planetary system to a deeper understanding of the cosmos