Does Anyone at CASIS Really Know What CASIS is Doing?
Keith’s update: At a NASA press conference on Thursday a senior representative from CASIS refused to provide basic cost numbers for the space station payloads it funds. Yet last week another senior CASIS representative volunteered specific ISS payload cost information. Why is CASIS leadership so confused about the basic services that it provides?
The press conference was about the science payloads on the upcoming CRS-8 SpaceX flight, Ken Shields, CASIS’ Director of Operations (on the right) appeared with 3 employees from Eli Lilly (in lab coats). Shields was asked what the costs associated with the CASIS-sponsored payloads aboard CRS-8 provided by pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly are. Shields declined to provide specifics other than to say that CASIS supports these payloads. When pressed again for a dollar amount, Shields again declined to provide a clear answer as to the cost borne by CASIS or NASA and punted to Lilly who then declined to say how much money they had put into this research. NASA PAO did not inform off-site media in advance that there was a dial-in number for this press event, so I tried using the #askNASA option via Twitter (which of course was ignored).
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Eli Lilly is a private company and its certainly up to them to reveal or not reveal this cost number. But CASIS is a non-profit organization that relies upon NASA for 99.9% of its budget and gets free transportation into space – fully paid for by NASA. So the real question is, how much does it cost NASA to support payloads such as the one being flown by Eli Lilly? With a title such as “Director of Operations”, you’d expect that someone like Shields would know the basic aspects of how CASIS does its prime task: flying payloads to the ISS – and what it costs to do so. Guess not.
Curiously, just a week earlier, at a briefing by CASIS at the National Academy of Sciences, CASIS Director of Commercial Innovation and Sponsored Programs Cynthia Bouthot (sorry for the spelling error on Twitter) said that CASIS provides $7.5 million per payload. Why was Ken Shields unable/unwilling to provide that answer at today’s press conference? He was clearly there at a press conference with the Eli Lilly folks to talk about their research – and CASIS just loves to brag about all of the money they have raised for payloads. You’d think that “how much does this all cost?” would be a question that he’d be prepared to answer. So, did Shields know the cost number and not answer or did he not know the number? Either way, that’s not a good sign.
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The issue of what CASIS does, what it spends, and who funds what it does has been a subject of interest of late for the NASA Advisory Council where they made a presentation As I noted in my story from earlier this week “CASIS Had A Bad Week In Washington” “CASIS’ repeated refusal to speak clearly on the topic of its income, funding, grants, and operations became problematical for the NAC. When pressed further on their income CASIS said that they were not allowed to generate “revenue” (even though their IRS returns clearly show that they did generate revenue albeit only a little). When the NAC members asked for more details on what CASIS was funding CASIS emphatically stated that they are not a “funding” organization. Moments later CASIS staff showed slides that talked about funding.”
Yet here we are, just a few days after CASIS’ Executive Director underwhelmed the NAC, and a member of CASIS senior management publicly states that does not know what it costs CASIS to fly payloads to the ISS while other senior CASIS staff cited specific numbers on that topic at yet another meeting last week. Does anyone at CASIS know what CASIS is doing?
Sick of the daily incompetence shown by NASA and CASIS regarding this matter. Corruption at its finest.
This whole thing confuses me. In fact I’m wondering if Keith is asking the wrong questions? No, not about how the costs of a payload, but this: isn’t it CASIS’ job to “grease the wheels”, so to speak? To make introductions, to show companies like EL who to contact, what order those contacts are to be made, where the paperwork bumps are, and the like?
These activities are enormously important and they certainly do not come without cost. My own business activities depend on helping applicants through the maze of environmental and construction permitting. But while my part is important, the cost is negligible in the big picture.
In CASIS’ case, Keith has already informed all of us that a fair chunk of the $15M is spent on salaries; I imagine much of the remaining is travel, entertainment, a bit of office rent, some printing- with little remaining. Perhaps CASIS has practically no money involved and simply doesn’t want to say so. Perhaps EL and others don’t want the number revealed (although a simple statement about proprietary information would be obvious).
@RJ: don’t confuse reticence with corruption. There’s much more to come on this story.
It may not be corruption, though I wonder how a bunch of people with so little knowledge of the payload integration process got in to CASIS at such high salaries. But I do agree with RJ – it is incompetence on both NASA’s and CASIS’ parts.NASA should have started on the utilization track much much earlier. And if they had figured out how to do the job properly in the past they should have applied that knowledge and experience instead of years later trying to figure out what needs to be done.
Keith – this is a recurring theme on NASA Watch. Why not propose what you’d consider to be a reasonable operating model for CASIS? What should their role be? How should they be engaged with commercial partners? What should they be doing to increase the scientific use of the station? Build a whitepaper, with the help of your readers, proposing how CASIS could be more effective. Develop something comprehensive and substantial, then submit it to CASIS, NASA, and the Hill.
Short of that, I think you’ll re-run this article about every four months.
You are quite right. Actually I have been working on other articles that do exactly that. I did not expect to be writing this story yesterday since I did not foresee this major blunder on the part of Shields.
@dreams: My first reaction to your comment? Its not the job of a reporter to do anything other than report the news. Aside from the extent to which a reporter reflects his own social milieu and therefore expresses shock at some things he sees, all we want and are expect facts.
As I started to think about it though I realized that there are few people actually qualified to “stand up” a coordination team with the charge CASIS carries. Does our genial host have these qualifications? Probably. He’s certainly crazy enough to try 🙂
And anybody who thinks this is simple should do some research on the Duning-Kruger Effect.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wi…
unfunded_dreams has the right idea, a white paper about what they should be doing to increase the scientific use of the station; except of course that both CASIS and NASA actually have a staff and a lot of money to be doing exactly this task. And its not new-NASA and its surrogates have done it before. While NW and its readers could certainly contribute, why hasn’t NASA’s ISS Program, in business now for 32 years, or CASIS, in business for the last five years, done this? What are they waiting for?
Fact is the task is pretty simple and straight forward.
(1) There ought to be only one or 2 places to go to find out who to contact, how to get on-board ISS. If I do a Google search, it ought to come up, first URL on the list. It might be an individual at CASIS for non exploration research and a contact at NASA or in the ISS Program for exploration research. It should be a name, a phone number, an email address. When I do this search currently, CASIS does not come up and NASA shows me a whole variety of neato science experiments, but never tells me who to contact. Why do I have to search for this and why isn’t it quickly available?
(2) a brief overview of top level ISS characteristics of significance to potential researchers: orbital inclination, orbital altitude, logistics capabilities-reasonable expectation of time and options to go up and time and options to come down; G level; There is an ISS Reference Guide which is pretty comprehensive, but far too much information for the prospective researcher who just wants to know the basics;
(3) interface characteristics: How to package my payload to fly: fly in a cubesat, a locker, a rack, or in place of any of these, or at some level of integration in between. Are there mass or density constraints for each level? Type of electrical power available and how this is provided-the physical interface as well as electrical characteristics. Data characteristics; can I send data in packets, through other pipelines; how active, how frequently, what quantity of data can be recorded, downlinked and uplinked. Can a payload be controlled from the ground?
What level of astronaut interface can be provided.
Is it stowed the same way it is set up for use? NASA provides a variety of “facilities”, freezers, gloveboxes, animal enclosures, centifuges, etc. Provide a simple catalog.
Those are the critical things.
NASA wastes all of its time telling everyone how exciting, innovative, useful, etc different experiments have been. Thats nice for a general audience that might be mildly interested in what goes on aboard the ISS, and it might even be good background for the researcher, but it is not central for most potential researchers, especially the uninitiated.
There ought to be a simple, straightforward, short questionnaire for the prospective researcher to fill out and send to the contact in (1). Once it is sent, there ought to be a short list of experts, probably divided by integration level (cubesat, locker, rack…) and by the nature of science: biological, chemical, physics, observation…Those people contact the prospective user immediately upon receipt of the questionnaire.
That is Task 1. If it is on the internet now, I do not find any of these pieces.
Task 2 is for the NASA or CASIS integration manager to begin to fill out a more complete description of the prospective payload. This should be in the form of a blank book, optimized so no piece of information needs to be submitted more than once. This Payload Integration Manager is the front door for the prospective researcher and works with the prospective researcher to fill this out. In time, as the information is more detailed, this will become an ICD, and will have engineering drawings attached. There may be some subsets of this to represent the launch, on-orbit and return configurations.
Task 3 is to fill out detailed operational characteristics, from which planning and procedures can be developed, potential mateirals and safety hazards, etc. These come later.
The researcher needs to know the extent to which their information will be kept confidential or the extent to which it is shared.
Fact is these questionnaires, blank books, ICDs, safety hazards and analyses, have all been done hundreds of times before and are readily available in records of the prior programs. None of these are new.
The way in which the current ISS document reads, “if you think you may be interested, then we need to begin to have a conversation”.
Prospective researchers need to be told what they need to know. In order to do this, the information ought to be readily available on the internet and NASA and CASIS ought to be presenting this information at industry conferences, as well as pinpointing specific company principals. The information they present ought to permit the prospective researcher to quickly assess interest.
My impression is that it is fairly easy to quantify funding that is actually transferred from one organization to another. When there is little or no transfer of funds and a payload provider gets launch integration and flight services then it is extremely difficulty to statewith any precision exactly how much each partner has spent. Personally this does not bother me; the launch is going to go up and if no one takes advantage of it the program won’t save any money.