Summary of Stealth NASA ISS Workshop
NASA Commercial LEO Workshop (with presentations)
“On December 10-11, 2014, NASA held a workshop on the commercialization of low Earth orbit. The goal of the workshop was to start a dialog about creating a thriving commercial marketplace in LEO over the next decade, enabled by human spaceflight.”
Another Stealth NASA ISS Event, Earlier post
“This NASA-sponsored ISS research event will not be webcast or recorded. No media advisory was sent out in advance. The event starts tomorrow. I find it especially odd that NASA has gone out of its way to not make this event more visible – and accessible – via simple webcasting (the event is being held directly across the street from NASA HQ) such that the potentially vast audience of possible users, media, decision makers, and students can better understand ISS potential capabilities.”
These presentations seem to avoid the elephant in the room, uncertainty about the fate of the space station after 2020/2024. This is worsened by a private sector that can easily discover a NASA divided, where exploration plans in human spaceflight and certain voices there want and need the ISS to end in 2024 to get those funds freed up for exploration elements from upper stages to habitats to landers. This is hardly an environment that will encourage the private sector to risk capital.
A firm commitment to the ISS regardless of European or Russian or other members would help, coming as policy, at least from the current administration. A policy statement as well commiting to making partnerships work with a goal of deleveraging the budget away from the ISS, while keeping it in orbit by means of private sector revenue, or other means to the same goal, a US govt policy that exploration plans are not linked to freeing up ISS funds, is required.
I agree. The ISS should be decommissioned only when a better ISS is operational. If we throw out our only foothold in space while demanding hundreds of billions for just a half dozen sorties to Mars we are likely to end up with neither.
The original idea behind ISS, and the NSTS was to establish the launch, return and on orbit servicing capabilities for LEO. But NASA didn’t get the price down for STS and terminated STS before they had a replacement.
NASA failed to get the process in place to bring in new payload customers on ISS in a timely fashion. They should have focused on that at the start, 20 years ago but when they didn’t, certainly should have been fixing the ISS payload procss starting 10 years ago so that they would have been able to expedite payloads on board by the time of assembly complete, now going on 5 years ago. They did not do that. They are just now beginning to try to fix their broken system. Their workshop charts make it sound like they are a bunch of neophytes just beginning to think about how to market, operate and regulate LEO, but that was something we were doing 20 years ago on Shuttle, on Spacehab, with CCDs and JEAs, and yet all of these folks are SES’s at the top of the program. Where is the experience base?
On top of this, workshops like this are so many preachers, preaching to the choir. Most of the corporate participants CASIS reflects are people who’ve been involved in space. Why aren’t they holding workshops for industries outside of space? Where are all the materials processing industries? They are not even identified on the CASIS charts. NASA looked at all of this in the 70s and 80s prior to and in the early years of Shuttle; in fact the studies were the basis for Begg’s successful sale of ISS to Reagan. These people are reinventing the wheel.
” Where are all the materials processing industries? They are not even
identified on the CASIS charts. NASA looked at all of this in the 70s
and 80s prior to and in the early years of Shuttle; in fact the studies
were the basis for Begg’s successful sale of ISS to Reagan.”
They aren’t there because there is no there there for those industries. Scientists were and are skeptical about ISS and for good reason. The shuttle needed someplace to go so the politicians gave it one for a while.
One of the most interesting notes is: who did NOT have a presentation?? Who is the one company that I can think of that is flying various experiments to ISS??
NanoRacks.
Do you wonder why they did not have a presentation on how they are doing it? They have experiments inside and outside of ISS, and they deploy CubeSats from ISS.
ZIN Technologies has done work on quite a number of ISS experiments and they were there. Perhaps NanoRacks wasn’t available.
Other conversations makes me think that they just don’t want to encourage the competition.
SpaceX was there, and had a one-on-one, Bigelow was there, UTC Aerospace Systems was there. Lots of people with long histories of innovation in space were there. I am getting hints that NanoRacks might think that if they could figure it out, so could their competitors.
At least the FAA proposal talked about fuel depots. JSC has done studies on them and found that they would make for a more robust and cheaper BEO exploration program. But the Senate is against them, seemingly to protect MSFC.