Space Station Science Has Been Left in the Dust – Again
Breakthrough in chemical crystallography, Academy of Finland
“As the SCD analysis is carried out with only one crystal, smaller than 0.1 x 0.1 x 0.1 mm in size, the required amount of the target molecule can be as low as 80 ng. Fujita’s and Rissanen’s work reports the structure determination of a scarce marine natural product from only 5 ug of it. Many natural and synthetic compounds for which chemists have almost given up the hope of analysing crystallographically can now be easily and precisely characterised by this method.”
Keith’s note: For more than 20 years one of the prime scientific uses that NASA has wanted to put the ISS to was the production of large, ultra-pure protein crystals – a staple of every chart or paper NASA has produced to justify the scientific uses and potential of the ISS. The idea being that such large, perfect crystals help improve the efficiency of traditional means of determining biochemical structure via protein crystallography. However it would seem that structural information for biological molecules can now be obtained from vanishingly small biological samples – on Earth. No need for all that expensive outer space stuff. If only NASA could find a way to get things from idea – to hardware – to orbit – and back faster and cheaper, the ISS might have played more of a role in this field of protein crystallography. Instead, while it dragged its feet in orbit progress continued on Earth. That is not to say that there is nothing you can do on the ISS. Quite the contrary. But good intentions aside, unless NASA and its semi-unwanted step child CASIS can speed things up, ISS will simply become less relevant.
– Using the ISS: Once Again NASA Has Been Left in the Dust, earlier post
– Realizing the Research Potential of the ISS Once and for All, earlier post
– While NASA Flies In Circles Technology Advances Back on Earth, earlier post
– One More Reason Not To Use the ISS?, earlier post
There’s really no excuse for this having happened. Maybe it would have been solved on Earth first even if the ISS approach had been going all out for the last 20 years, but we’ll never know because it simply wasn’t done, despite being, as Keith points out, one of the staple justifications for building the ISS.
I still firmly believe in the potential of the ISS and the logic behind its creation, but there’s so much that could have and should have been done on the ISS long before now that isn’t being done. The many biological issues, in particular, have been attacked in bits and pieces at best, often repeated bits and pieces, without any sort of overall coordinated plan, as far as I’ve been able to find.
WHY is this continuing to happen after so many years and after having been pointed out so many times? Exactly who is the group/person who has been throwing sand in the gears all these years and why? It’s long past time that heads were rolling over this dismal performance. NanoSats and student projects are all well and good NASA, but how about issuing some RFPs for investigating the basic HSF biological problems that have been on the books since day one but still have no answers, and in some cases not even any new data.
Despite the sequestration, NASA has ways to offer incentives to those who are willing and capable to address the issues that ISS should have been working on all along, which could be used to enhance to RFPs. Even the crystalography work is not finished, despite the Finish breakthrough, and the ISS is still a logical place to look at developing large crystals.
So much potential, yet so much time and money wasted! I’d like to see an inquest done. Treat it like a court case and trot out those (ir)responsible people to answer for their (lack of) actions. Maybe there’s actually good reasons why the ISS has been so thoroughly underused; if so let’s hear them and then look at how to fix things.
A non-NASA group is planning to send two people on a trip to Mars and back, and I’m sure they’ll be employing all of the many techniques that NASA has tested and validated on the ISS for protection from various radiations, closed-cycle ECS systems, etc. On the bright side, it won’t cost them a single dime to implement every one of NASA’s ISS-proven life protection techniques, all none of them.
NASA’s contribution to investigating the HSF issues is their Advanced Biological Research System (ABRS) [ http://www.nasa.gov/mission… ]. It is a “single locker system” that has “two growth chambers,” neither of which is anywhere near large enough to hold a person. When I search NASA for the ABRS experimental results all I can find is “Information Pending.”
Two decades of floundering is enough. Who the hell is responsible for this?
Steve:
I am not sure that you can point to any single person as the one responsible for the research failing of ISS, it is embedded in what has become the culture of NASA, especially the Human Space Flight side of the game. When I testified in the late 80s I said that if, and that was a very big IF, NASA could get to the point of letting ISS run like a research facility, a Nobel Prize would come from work in the life sciences most probably. The history of science is clear, if you give science new horizons and capabilities to explore, great discoveries will follow as surely as night follows day. But NASA could not, and probably will not, be able/willing to let people who know how to do research run that aspect of ISS and its associated transportation system. The oft discussed FFRDC approach to utilization turned into a joke, so I am not sanguine that we will see a turn around there. The potential of studying both normal and abnormal whole living systems in an “abnormal” — for terrestrial organisms — environment would almost certainly lead to remarkable findings if the researchers were allowed to operate in a true research mode. But, budget and other issues led to cancellation of key facilities on ISS, and the uber controlling aspects of the agency fundamentally limit what might be done. NASA killed a viable man-tended concept that would have allowed much of the so-called micro gravity research to be done, while leaving resources on the crewed ISS where crew was needed for the research.
It is sad.
“NASA could not, and probably will not, be able/willing to let people who know how to do research run that aspect of ISS and its associated transportation system.”Actually Scot007, in the 1990s the Space and Life Sciences organization did manage the integration process for virtually ALL payloads flying on Shuttle and Mir and being developed for ISS. Big payloads like the Spacehab Module and AMS were managed out of that organization. Sub-rack (middeck) and rack class payloads were managed out of that organization. They got the integration process down to well under a year for many payload types. But the life sciences management did not want to be entrusted with that job and preferred to focus on only scientific research in the ISS era, and against the wishes of ISS management they gave up payload integration. The ISS management, being insular from the rest of NASA and chauvinistic about the abilities of their own inexperienced people refused to let any experience in (and even if it had its tough to buck the top level managers who have zero interest in science). An entirely new crew of people came in to try and figure out the process. For most of the last 15 years they were not at all interested in prioritizing science or utilization. With the same organization managing assembly, mission integration and science integration no one was pushing to reduce the overhead and time required to fly science. Science was on the back burner. Development of new and convoluted processes threw the program back to the early 80s time frame or worse. Payload integration was taking 3-5 years for simple payloads; AMS took fifteen. Considerably longer and more expensive processes than in earlier programs.
So in many ways the science people did it to themselves.
Actually, it was specifically the Life Sciences “managers” -they were almost all research scientists – they didn’t want Space Science either. And they didn’t want any responsibility for the design of environmental protection in the spacecraft or for mission or vehicle integration. They had tremendous capability and wielded real power and authority because they were in the driver’s seat when it came to determining and integrating the vehicle and mission design, and they succeeded in a couple weeks of sheer stupidity in wiping out three decades of experience and development so they could focus solely on ‘research’. They thought they were doing themselves a favor by narrowing their focus on life science research. A lot of good space research does if you cannot fly it in space.
Interesting, and has the ring of truth. Observation of earth and space, with the exception of AMS, has been sorely neglected while the value of life sciences has been overstated. But when were the “couple of weeks”, and what brought it on?
What brought it on was a lack of knowledge by the Life Science managers of what their organization did and how it contributed towards their ultimate goals, and an attitude of self importance. The two weeks were simply the point at which their self absorption, ill feelings towards anyone not an MD or PhD (in liffe sciences), bias and narcissism built to a creshendo.
Originally it was the “Space and Life Sciences” division, wasn’t it? Big difference between that and “Space life sciences”. Did biological and nonbiological science get completely divorced? That would have been a key mistake. I remember a presentation on a medium-sized UV telescope to be mounted on ISS as a precursor to eventual free-flyer application. Seemed like a great idea, but apparently it lost funding. Lots of proposals for earth observation cameras but virtually nothing after over a decade. Apparently it takes less time to do an unmanned mission to Mars then to put decent earth multispectral imaging available to anybody on the ISS. AMS made it, but barely. Maybe this fits in with what you are talking about.
Brian:
You are right that the science community, both inside NASA and externally, must shoulder some of the blame. We have a tendency to confuse “requirements” and “desirements”, with the latter often driving silly engineering and program decisions, but from your comments I gather you were there for some if not most of this history. For example, there was great fuss early on about having the entire ISS be a microgravity environment, when in fact most of the problems could be dealt with at the rack level with isolation systems tuned to whatever frequencies were a problem area for microgravity experiments, but there was inordinate concern about how to have the entire ISS be a “quiet” facility.
The problem generally boils down to management, not the working folk. Life science, and I am not a life scientist, was a stepchild for years within NASA. It finally got booted out of the Space and Earth Sciences and when ISS (not called that at the time) came along, that community and the microgravity communities suddenly appeared to have muscle, and the management of those communities did not always use the best judgement. A sidebar is that while the management had been research scientists, most were not practicing at the time. They had become managers with turf to watch, and so did not always really operate and think like active researchers. And, as you said, the ISS people felt that they had to reinvent, instead of using what was working reasonably well.
While I hope that the AMS results lead to something that could be nominated for a Nobel Prize, we need to recognize that the role of ISS in this would be to be a large spacecraft. It, AMS, is not enabled by what makes ISS a unique research facility.
I do not see a Nobel in life sciences. We don’t learn how a rat works by putting the whole rat under water,
Now dark matter, that’s another matter entirely.
Steve:
I forgot to mention that the man-tended facility was a commercial operation and this was in the late 80s/early 90s.
Steve,
You say “I’d like to see an inquest done. Treat it like a court case and trot out those (ir)responsible people to answer for their (lack of) actions.”
Great idea, but it will never happen. There is a clear set of individuals in control of the ISS, its missions and use, in NASA, Congress and the White House. These individuals are shrewd, seasoned operators. They protect their turf and their power. They are masters of bias and special agendas, at dodging the truth or in taking the necessary actions and at exempting themselves from accountability. They could object to such a statement, but the (lack of) outcomes from ISS to date speak so starkly for everyone that if they openly objected the audience would laugh them out of the room. It would be easy to name each person responsible, but no one will because of the consequences tied to calling them out.
In society today, steal a loaf of bread and you go to jail for 5 years. But waste $500 million in a month as the ISS decays, year after year, by grossly failing to use a $60 billion dollar U.S. asset effectively and there is absolutely no consequence. This is just another staggering failure of accountability for the Nation.
Conversely, a number of remarkable things have been done on the ISS, but ironically many of those same indivduals are unaware or ignorant of those outcomes.
Take a look at the comedy (or tragedy) of outcomes on this Paid Memberships link: http://www.iss-casis.org/Da… The resulting metrics from a $30 million dollar expenditure has partially resulted in a $70 dollar contribution. Granted, the prior year was $3,200 dollars, which might mean they’ve already passed their peak. Would you spend $30 million to get $3270 dollars?
We might want to consider renaming the “ISS” to the “FSS” (Florida Space Station) given the State skewed results on the Member Geography chart on the same link, although if it was renamed FSS then citizens might conclude that Florida could just pay for the entire FSS cost itself.
npng,
I spent some time with the Dashboard. It’s all one level deep with no useful information from which one can evaluate/decide anything that I can see. A complete waste of time. But it is pretty.
Steve
Good people,
Thank you very much for your information and observations. You convince me more than ever that this has become a “we’re not going to take it” situation.
First off, the switch in emphasis from life sciences to micro-gravity I’m guessing may have been somebody’s idea for a quicker turn-around for spin-offs or industry-benefiting hand-offs, as opposed to longer-term research results with perhaps lesser meaning to the general public. If so, then I would say that someone made a bad decision and then subsequently walked away and ignored it. Bad management.
Second, I’m not sure (I honestly don’t know) that the man-tended facility being a commercial operation would have had a lot of bearing on the changes that have happened. It was/is ultimately someone higher up in NASA who decides what gets done. Who does the work can affect its quality and efficiency, but not the work selection itself, unless the selected commercial entity is incapable of doing the selected work, which still comes back to a bad NASA management decision.
Ultimately, the management system is a hierarchy, which it must be for any organization so large. And in that hierarchy, everybody has a boss, someone responsible for both facilitating the needs of his/her subordinates and evaluating the results of their work. So, every time one of these disrupting middle managers that you’ve all pointed to has deleted/rejected/buried a life sciences experiment (or performed any of the other objectionable activities that people such as yourselves have witnessed) there was a more senior manager who either approved, or didn’t know, or didn’t care; it doesn’t matter which, he/she still shares in the guilt.
So, the question becomes, How far up the chain of command does this problem flow? Does it stop at middle management? Does it stop inside NASA? Does it have support all the way to Congress and the White House? At least one of you has indicated that this latter situation is the case, which would make it a much tougher problem indeed — but not necessarily impossible to fix. The people have the media as a tool, and since the politicians are not reluctant to use the media to their advantage, there’s no reason why the people can’t do the same. Every politician’s career lives and dies by the acceptance of his/her constituents. Even the suggestion of wrong-doing can be a powerful bargaining chip, as long as hasty comments and slanderous remarks are avoided.
In today’s “information world” it is easier, and cheaper, than ever to get an opinion piece copied and elevated over a wide range of viewers, starting on the web and then through letters-to-the-editor getting it into print media. It won’t happen over night. The ISS problem was created and escalated one day at a time, over many years, so it may take a while to get public attention focused on it — and kept focused on it for more than an hour; that’s the real challenge. But I think it can be done with some degree of success, at least enough to get questions asked seriously in the right places, if people like yourselves are willing to come forward with with the facts, even anonymously.
Do any of you agree? Or am I engaged in wishful thinking?
Thanks,
Steve
The technique, as described, doesn’t work on proteins yet (they are too big to fit in the scaffold). Teams are working to change that, though.
Which brings us right back to original rationale for working in micro-gravity, creating larger crystals.
This is all simplistic. Thee are a lot of proteins and they are all different. Protein structures have been solved by all sorts of methods. Some people don’t use X-ray diffraction at all, using software that actually solved the folding problem from the DNA sequence. Other proteins have been solved by crystallization with many different methods, hanging drop, sitting drop, sandwich drop, top-down, etc. Some proteins will not form crystals at all. But there is a subset that do crystallize a little better in space. Microgravity was never a panacea, and neither is every new “solution to everything” that comes along every few months. But 0-G remains a useful tool when simpler ground-based methods fail.
OTOH no materials science process is -only- possible in space, and it was a mistake for NASA to put so much publicity into perfect semiconductors, perfect ball bearings, continuous flow electrophoresis, or salmonella vaccine, none of which actually require space. NASA makes an error when they suggest that some inadvertent biproduct, something we get “free” because of human spaceflight, can then be used to justify its enormous cost.
There is science which makes sense, and that is studying what is there, or visible there, the sky above and the earth below. The AMS is providing information that could not be gathered on the ground, and being on the station it can be maintained and upgraded. Optical and UV telescopes can be mounted on the structure, or co-orbit. The staion orbits over most of the earth, and could be festooned with imaging sensors; the amount of information about earth that could be collected every monute is greater than the total amount of microgravity and life science data collected on ISS, yet there is almost no imaging capability. There is no magical product that will make us rich, but there is useful knowledge if we look patiently and realistically.
vulture4,
I really got a kick out of the Fold-it protein folding method. I am not a gamer myself, but I do like puzzles and I thought this was a brilliant solution to a large intractable problem. Never underestimate the possibilities of human imagination.
Steve
Bill,
I can’t agree with your suggestion. I see it as what I call the Linus van Pelt theory (from the Peanuts comics): “There is no problem so large that it can not be successfully run away from.“
Consider what the ISS has cost; consider what it represents; consider that the capability to do most of the things that it was sold on can still be done. To me, it would be either cowardly or lazy to simply admit defeat and scrap it, thereby letting a group of self-centered dysfunctional bureaucrats continue to run (ruin) important things.
I don’t see trying to fix this problem as throwing away good money after bad. I see it as taking back from a handful of people an incredible facility that many thousands of people worked hard to create — a one of a kind creation with potentialities that nothing else available to mankind can match.
This is important and we can’t simply continue to turn our backs on it because there’s no apparent simple answer. We need to take back what belongs to everyone, not a handful of managers with their own agendas and power structures.
Steve
NASA HSF program offices are usually political because they don’t at least in past programs harbor the technical people. In the case of ISS its risen to a new level of political bureaucracy and the corruption is self-evident with things like the lack of progress in payloads. Fortunately ISS operates in a relatively benign environment unlike a Shuttle, so the liklihood they will kill anyone is slim, but if you are looking for progress it will be nonexistent especially with essentially no NASA leadership at work. ISS is a massive industry unto itself and its chief goal is preserving its own inefficient management. Unless there is fairly regular turnover of the top managers with new ones coming in periodically, then expect more of the same. Its one of the downsid of a big international program. The local masters think that maintaining continuity is good for the international relations but its pretty bad for progress, change or efficiency because there is absolutely no reason for the program management to change how they are operating. Inefficiency, ineffectiveness, gross budget malfeasance and corruption in personnel practices should be expected because its a bureacracy without control; it has run amok.
“The local masters think that maintaining continuity is good for the international relations“
I must admit that I don’t understand this part of it. The people representing the international partners are no less intelligent than NASA people and stand to gain or lose exactly the same things. I would have thought that the partners would be as concerned and as disappointed as anyone else, considering the investment they’ve also made. So, it would seem that either they’re not bothered by it, or else they are and NASA is ignoring them, and we’re (in the rest of the world) simply not hearing about it.
If I represented Japan, or ESA, or any of the EU countries, I would have been raising flags and demanding answers long since, but I don’t hear of that happening. Is it? I’m Canadian (our dollar investment is ISS programs relatively low), and our government and space agency are no better. They just write up and crow about the good accomplishments of working with NASA, but ignore the problem issues, like no meaningful life sciences research on the ISS.
As sad as it seems, maybe the “local masters” are right?