NASA Only Pretends To Be Interested in Space Commerce
New funding matchmaker will cater to NIH rejects, Science Magazine
“Last year, U.S. researchers received about 42,500 pieces of bad news from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Their grant proposal had been rejected; they wouldn’t be receiving a piece of the agency’s roughly $30 billion federal funding pie. For many, the next step is to cast around for slices of smaller piesgrants from nonprofit disease foundations or investments from private companies that might keep their projects alive. Now, a new program aims to play matchmaker between these researchers and second-chance funders. The Online Partnership to Accelerate Research (OnPAR), a collaboration between NIH and the defense, engineering, and health contractor Leidos, lets researchers upload rejected NIH proposals to an online portal where potential funders can review the scores received from reviewers, and decide whether to put up cash.”
– A Pilot Partnership to Find Private Support for Unfunded Applications, NIH
Philanthropist Paul Allen announces $100 million gift to expand ‘frontiers of bioscience’, Washington Post
“His goal is to help facilitate a more interdisciplinary approach by giving scientists with out-of-the-box ideas the equipment, staff and connections to counterparts in math, engineering, physical sciences and computer science — so their work can reach its full potential, he explained.”
Keith’s note: This is the guy behind XPrize, Planetary Resources, Stratolaunch, etc.
NIH is getting creative – so is Paul Allen. Why can’t NASA do something like this? Perhaps this concept would not do much for multi-hundred million science mission proposals, but smaller things such as aerospace technology, life science, and material science research proposals might benefit. Not everything NASA turns down is bad. A lot of it is just fine, but the agency doesn’t have the money – or the foresight to think outside of their traditional sandbox. CASIS is supposed to be doing something like this. Usually all they do is give away free (or allow reduced pricing) on rides to space and they do so with funding that is 99.997% from NASA.
Every now and then CASIS does find a biotech company that agrees to underwrite a portion of some research – but the details are fuzzy as to what this really means when its time to write a check. CASIS does not like to get into specifics in this regard. Although I do have to say that the one bright light that is happening via CASIS is Nanoracks. They have exhibited non-stop creativity and efficiency in all that they do. But CASIS has yet to repeat this example.
NASA is very binary on the matter of funding and picking winners – either you get funded or you don’t. Or you can reapply until you get funded or just give up. It would be nice if the agency thought of ways to pool these proposals and match them with other potential funders. NASA employees (who have limited or zero private sector experience) regularly toss phrases around wherein they claim to want to bring “the entire economic sector” up to LEO. Well, they won’t see that happen if they are the only funding source in LEO. Nor will this happen unless they do a lot more to actually remove hindrances and energetically facilitate access to LEO commercial funding by actual commercial entities – not just from a congressional creation (CASIS) which cloaks itself in a 501(c)(3) designation so as to launder NASA money.
By the way, you can listen to the NASA ISS National Laboratory/CASIS imaginary plan for LEO commercialization next Wednesday at a day-long symposium “Research in Commercial LEO” at the NAS Space Studies Board Space Science Week.
Earlier CASIS posts
NASA employees (who have limited or zero private sector experience)… [U]nless they do a lot more to actually remove hindrances and
energetically facilitate access to LEO commercial funding by actual
commercial entities….
Sir, you are asking a hippo to win the 500-meter freestyle swim. The beast can huff and puff and splash a lot of water, but what you ask just isn’t in its DNA.
I run into “planners” all the time in my day job, guys charged with things like “revitalizing” a downtown area. Funny if not sad, they haven’t a clue how to put together a real estate project and make it work, but they have lots of advice for the guys who are out there taking the actual risk.
Commerce? We know they only pretend to be interested in space travel.
I’ll call unfair on that. NASA is bound by what Congress will fund. If you want space travel, tell your representatives to fund it.
Made me laugh out loud. Sad, but true things must make me laugh.
Not surprised, NASA, especially HQ, may talk the talk about space commerce to make the Congress Critters and space advocates happy, but generally ignores it as an organization. A lot of the NASA folks would be happy to bar all commercial activities from space if they had the power. It’s been this way since Daniel Goldin was Administrator.
It’s been this way from the beginning of NASA. Many of the Germans were 1930s-style international socialists and the US military had (and has) little sympathy for private enterprise. Both regard making a profit as a filthy business.
And don’t forget the low opinion scientists have of mere merchants even though its the societal wealth business creates that makes modern science possible.
Nanoracks does an excellent job of carrying experiments to and from orbit, but someone still has to fund the actual science and engineering to develop the experiments, and do it for more than just one flight for each.
Either government or business can be corrupt. Neither has to be. The key is having good judgment. Since the US was built largely on public-private partnerships, maintaining a “very firm line” between them strikes me as a dysfunctional way to avoid making the needed judgments.
On ISS, NASA has a lot of problems trying to sell it as a commercial base, despite the fact that, if you recall, Reagan justified it on the basis of expanding commerce into space.
The first problem is capacity. ISS has very little capacity for additional utilization. The constraining resource is crew time, and there is essentially none of that available. Nanoracks does fine because they are self contained and require almost no crew involvement. Of course other constraining resources are down mass and down volume, and up mass and up volume, and electrical power and cooling.
If you get beyond that, then you’ll find that the integration process is not terribly well defined or consistent; it depends a lot on the individuals you have to deal with on any given day. And CASIS just superimposes another layer of integration on top of too many existing layers. And most of those layers and individuals disagree amongst themselves as to how to do the job. Complexity of process and numbers of people and organizations you have to deal with translates into an extended schedule. And time and complexity add up to one thing: money.
And if you need substantial support-launch mass, or on-orbit resources of any kind, and the time and costs associated with interfacing with NASA-then you’ll quickly find you cannot afford the actual costs. Maybe if NASA had a streamlined expedited process, and NASA offers its services for free, or if the services get divided up to the gnat’s eyelashes, like Nanorack handles the interfaces, But as long as we are talking hundreds of millions of dollars and several years to get on-board, no one can compete with ground based activity of virtually any kind.
NASA solved a lot of these problems for other programs, years ago. Now they are trying to reinvent themselves and regain what they once had. But if ISS only last until 2028, then the program is more than half over and NASA has wasted it.
So much time, and effort and money invested, and such hard-won political support by so many people over the last 40 years, to try and make it work, and the biggest issue has been the NASA organization behind the effort.
Sounds like all the more reason for NASA to supplement ISS with an astronaut tended BA330 in the same orbit. You could send all the commercial activity to it and keep the ISS for pure noncommercial science 🙂
Not quite sure why anyone would think that offering a new facility, whether a man-tended inflatable or anything else, is necessarily “more reason”.
Unless NASA figures out a way to become more efficient, it already cannot do everything it might like on ISS. A separate man-tended facility adds more logistics requirements; if its supposed to be in an orbit near to the iSS so that ISS could service it, then it requires new capabilities to fly back and forth. more man-hour requirements. And there is no assurance that the complexity, paperwork, schedule and costs will be any less.
Nanoracks handles much of the interface between the experimenter and NASA. To the experimenter it appears the process is expedited. Similarly in earlier programs, NASA learned that putting in place a buffer to handle the integration, safety, documentation, proved more efficient than trying to have the program perform these functions.
The problems are all about costs of transportation and costs of operations. NASA has shown it has real difficulty overcoming its own bureaucracy.
I agree, and to make matters even worse, In the case of ISS, instead of using expedited methods that had been proven over many years, NASA’s corrupt crony system put a bunch of people in charge of payload integration who had no experience in payload integration. So regardless of anything NASA had learned in earlier programs, on ISS it is like starting all over again with neophytes, and unfortunately in the too large and complex ISS organization, even if anyone might have known what they should have been doing, they had to fight the bureaucratic complexities. ISS is wasting any chance it might have had to be productive.