Confusion at CASIS: Wired Magazine Takes a Closer Look
The Future of the International Space Station Is Up to a Weird Little Florida Nonprofit, Wired
“Which brings us to March, when the NASA Advisory Council released a memo that included this: The Council has also been told by NASA that a successful transition from the “Earth Reliant” phase to the “Proving Ground” is dependent at least in part on the success of attracting future commercial users of the ISS and/or the availability of commercial LEO laboratory capability that NASA could use. The Council therefore feels that it would be beneficial for the agency to better understand the effect that the resources being devoted to the ISS National Laboratory might have on the important research needed to reduce technology and human health risk for the Journey to Mars.”
Ken Shields, director of operations for Casis, takes issue with the assessment. “This is one man’s opinion, but there were a few vociferous members of NAC who didn’t do a lot of due diligence on what we do, our history,” he says. “They read some news stories, brought some gotcha information, and I wish I had been there in person.”
Keith’s note: This is strange. With regard to this NASA Advisory Council meeting on 31 March/1 April 2016 CASIS employees Greg Johnson, Michael Roberts, and Brian Talbot from CASIS were physically in attendance. In addition, CASIS employees Ken Shields, Warren Bates, Patrick O’Neill, and Cindy Martin Brennan attended via dial-in. So Ken Shields should have heard the entire conversation, right? He could have sent a text to his boss and asked to say something if his ears were burning. NASA Advisory Council meetings are open to the public, available for free via dial-in and Webex. The words Shields takes issue with were blessed by the entire NAC.
At this meeting the NAC decided that a team should make a site visit to CASIS to look into these issues. Shortly thereafter the NAC chair, Steve Squyres resigned and NAC leadership was thrown into disarray. CASIS objected to the whole idea of a NAC site visit. During the leadership vacuum CASIS, NASA, and a sympathetic NAC member made certain that site the visit and further consideration of NAC were buried. It is quite clear that CASIS is afraid of external scrutiny and does not think that it should be help publicly accountable for what it does with $15 million of NASA money every year.
CASIS Had A Bad Week In Washington, earlier post, earlier post
“The next day the CASIS entourage, led by President and Executive Director Greg Johnson, showed up at the NASA Advisory Council (NAC) meeting. Things did not go so well for them at the NAC. Within minutes of starting to talk, NAC members started to pepper Johnson with questions- questions that he was unable and/or unwilling to answer. It went downhill from there.”
A Closer Look At The CASIS “Space Is In It” Endorsement, earlier post
“On 31 March 2016 NASA International Space Station Director Sam Scimemi sent a letter to Greg Johnson on a number of topics. One of the issues Scimemi raised had to do with how CASIS hypes/promotes the research that it takes credit for having facilitated onboard the ISS. “
Letter From NASA to CASIS 31 March 2016, earlier post
“We would advise caution in the lending of the ISS National Lab brand (via your “Space is in it” certification) too freely; care must be taken to that research performed on the ISS has actually influenced product development in advance of awarding the certification. Failure to do so weakens the brand and may lend an air of being nonserious in our mutual quest to fully utilize the ISS as a national lab.
Very good, straightforward honest assessment. Unfortunate, because the article really says that the future of ISS and maybe even of NASA human space flight and NASA is totally dependent on the CASIS organization which has demonstrated in five years absolutely zero ability to do the job. There were a lot of people experienced at doing this kind of work, most notably people out of the Shuttle and Spacehab programs who had lots of experience at recruiting organizations out of industry and academia to develop and fly payloads and make use of the unique opportunity. You really have to wonder who at NASA was responsible for giving the job to a bunch of obviously inadequately prepared or experienced people. Lets see…led by a pilot astronaut with no substantive experience? Let me guess… unfortunately stupid decisions have consequences.
While it is unfortunate, criminal really, that NASA failed to get some people on the CASIS job who were qualified and capable of doing the work, NASA itself has owned this responsibility for the last 3 decades of the ISS Program. CASIS only inherited about half the responsibility in the last five years. The NASA ISS Program is pretty dysfunctional. It is not set up with a normal set of organizations like any other human space flight program. Recently, at the conclusion of the one year mission, the mission scientist (who works in the research program, not in the ISS Program), told the relatively new program manager that the organizations within the ISS Program did not understand what their different divisions’ respective responsibilities were, or their products, or who was to collect which kinds of information and for what purposes.
Remember back to Dan Goldin edicting that no one who had been working in the pre-ISS Program was permitted to take a leading position in ISS, and the individual selected for the position of ISS Program Manager had essentially no human space flight program management experience. So talk about the blind leading the blind-a bunch of neophytes.
And the ISS program of course went way over budget, almost continuously, and never made schedules, not to mention some serious technical problems, and serious leadership and followership problems until Boeing bought out all the other contractors. Even then, when it came time to turn over the big hardware to NASA, they found that Boeing had not really kept track of the certification. So here was NASA, in 1995, with 3 decades of science integration experience in human space flight, and they used absolutely none of that. In fact a couple years later they turned off all of the science/payload support that had been developed over the prior 30 years. and now, 2 decades later, NASA has yet to recover, still is not getting the job done when it comes to payloads and utilization, and CASIS is following NASA’s lead?? Talk about the blind leading the blind. If ever the program needed some experience and leadership…
It is not just a question of “recruiting”. Part of the difficulty is that there isn’t much funding for ISS payloads and the funding that is available tends to be for very restrictive goals such as preparing for human flight to Mars. Nanoracks has done a good job of developing standard accommodations, both in the pressurized volume for microgravity experiments and external remote sensing/astronomical payload accommodations, but without funding programs that allow for a wide spectrum of university-level projects, particularly, in my view, for remote sensing and astronomy, it is going to be hard to find the few original ideas that are really worth flying.
How does the funding actually work? On the SMD side, they have a number of program elements which solicit proposals every year (e.g. a Mars Data Analysis Program, to, well, analyse data from the robotic Mars missions.) The funding levels, duration of contracts, expected contents of proposals, review process, etc. are all vaguely standardized. Flight experiments and lab work requiring new facilities are a little different, but not radically so. But, other than CubeSats launched from ISS and hosted payloads, I have no idea how one would propose to get an experiment on ISS or get funding to develop one.
The funding of utilization is an interesting but a long and evolving story; here is a simplified version:
Between the 1960s and 1990s, NASA provided funding to develop and fly payloads. It started in Apollo with NASA funding ALSEP. For Skylab, NASA leaders decided that the future of human space flight was on the line and they had to show that useful science could be done. Skylab paid for major solar physics, earth resources and life science programs. NASA established partner relationships with several user organizations.
For the first 2/3 of Shuttle, it was the same philosophy. In the first few years of Shuttle there was belief that Shuttle could dramatically expand utilization and commercialization. Several agreements were established with big pharmaceutical companies like Johnson and Johnson, Riker Labs, sometimes together with aerospace, like McDonnell Douglas (Continuous Flow Electrophoresis) and other companies to do basic research and process development, like 3M and John Deere.
It appeared that utilization and commercialization might be so successful that several new organizations were established at Headquarters specifically to help guide the development of utilization, science commercial and technology payloads. Each was teamed with a Headquarters Code (Directorate). Each Directorate had funds to support utilization. The Codes would define worthwhile science or development programs and Congress would fund them.
Headquarters Code C started with a series of Commercial Development Centers around the country, most associated with universities. Code C providing seed money to each and each was supposed to go out and find industry partners to work with. They were supposed to be developing payloads to fly on Shuttle. In a few cases this worked and a few were successful: Center for Macromolecular Crystallography (Protein Crystal Growth) at U Alabama Birmingham, Bioserve at U Colorado developing a variety of mixing devices for mainly organic chemistry, Wisconsin developed a series of greenhouses for plant growth.
Then the Challenger accident interrupted.
But Code C and the Commercial Centers were still there. Most of the Centers saw there was a big Shuttle payload backlog-especially after Challenger, and so they ‘pocketed’ the NASA funds-paid their Directors and administrative staff, but formed few partnerships and built few payloads. NASA shut many of the centers down but kept the successful centers going.
Code C, thinking there was a backlog of payloads coming, commissioned a company, Spacehab, to build modules commercially to fly payloads. Same model as used in the last five years for commercial cargo was being done starting about 1987. No one at NASA thought Code C, with its meager funds, could afford to do this, but Spacehab was genuinely inexpensive by comparison with the Code M Shuttle, Station and Spacelab programs. Spacehab developed streamlined payload integration processes, Spacehab worked with payload developers to prepare and develop payloads to fly. By comparison, Spacelabs carried a similar payload and every mission cost $$billions and only flew about once a year. Spacehab cost tens of millions $$ each flight and could fly every few months.
When NASA Mir started and the Shuttle was trying to figure out how they could afford to fly a series of missions to Mir, they could afford Spacehab; they could not afford Spacelab’s cost or schedule. Through the NASA Mir Program payload development and utilization worked smoothly on both Spacehab sortie missions and Mir missions. NASA was funding payloads and NASA was also paying the Russians to use Mir.
All aspects of science and utilization, including the science mission operations and integration was performed by the NASA science Code-primarily Codes L and C. Process, schedules and costs were streamlined because the people doing the job had considerable experience and because the Codes paying the bill could not afford more.
Unfortunately, though, a continuing theme of ISS has been they try to take over and directly manage everything.
In the late 1990s, ISS decided it would be more efficient if the ISS Program managed science, science integration, and payloads directly. ISS basically swallowed the other Headquarters Codes and their budgets. Code M, Space Operations did Shuttle and Station including the payloads flying on these vehicles. For awhile they kept the science integration bureaucracy separate from the Shuttle and Station programs. So the ISS Program was the provider, and the science entities were the customer.
But then Station management decided they wanted the funding that was going into payloads to pay the skyrocketing costs of operating ISS. ISS moved all ‘payloads’ and ‘science’ management and integration functions into the ISS Program Office. They refused to take the people doing the science and integration jobs and gave those jobs to inexperienced ISS people. So all of the established science integration documentation and processes were trashed.
There was little science being being flown or operated because the focus was on ISS assembly, and then on ISS survival after Columbia.
Once ISS assembly was complete, the ISS program no longer had an excuse for not performing science. so in the last five years they have been “encouraging” more science. The old NASA Codes that had performed this function are long gone. The National Lab concept and CASIS were established as part of the encouragement. But the level of funding to support utilization was never reestablished..
For some reason the ISS Program costs never came down.
By this time everyone has forgotten that a significant portion of what is now ISS Program funding was originally money that had been going into science and utilization.
Now NASA’s leaders say they are here to explore and not to operate, use or demonstrate the use of LEO; it is apparently no longer NASA’s place to develop commerce and industry in space. So the philosophy has dramatically changed since the beginning of the program.
This was mysterious to me. Thanks for a comprehensive picture. Based on what you say, loss of the Spacehab module with the Columbia may have accelerated the loss of expertise and funding for flying science on manned spacecraft.
But with Commercial Cargo and Crew for logistics and Nanoracks for accomodations, we finally have the potential for real science on the ISS. How do we get the people and funding back?
fcrary asked if he had an experiment and wanted to fly it on ISS, what should he do.
Daniel Woodard asked how would we get the funding and people back to put real science on ISS.
These are good questions.
I cannot explain the process for getting an experiment or payload on ISS. I’ve never seen or heard a clear explanation. NASA has a series of ISS guides available. They have an ISS reference guide and a whole series of Researchers guides, and a presentation entitled ‘how to get new research on ISS. They cover a lot of information but not how you would get an experiment or payload on-board ISS’. In the ISS reference guide-“utilization edition” says for more information, refer to the “NASA ISS internet” website; nothing specific to utilization at all; no contact information, and little specific information. The posted presentation on how to get new research on is very top level, generic-“find funding from NASA or somewhere else”, series of stages in developing an experiment. “strategic, tactical, operations….” in fact they’ve not even identified the “integration” process at all. The 15 “researchers guides” don’t all appear to be online. They are a hybrid of research disciplines, kinds of experiments, facilities, on-orbit environment…some good or interesting information, but not much detail on how you’d get started.
There were integration guides for Shuttle, Spacelab and Spacehab. They were quite specific. In the case of Shuttle, there was an STS Form 100; the Shuttle program wanted the name of prospective payload sponsors and every submission was met with an immediate personalized program response. To get the name of the prospective researcher in front of the NASA management; these earlier guides identified the offices, names and phone numbers of the individuals to contact.
For Shuttle, there were “road shows” in which the integration engineers for different systems, types of payloads, or types of hardware, presented the salient details that someone developing a payload would need to know: the mechanical interfaces, the electrical, the data, stowage, logistics, propulsion options (for deployable satellites), the documentation requirements, the safety review process, PI support of operations, facilities at launch, landing and during on orbit operations and who to contact for more information in every case. The information was not organized by research discipline. We figured if we found the right people, they would know what kind of research they would want to conduct.
Of course in the earlier programs, the program did not own the scientific research. There was no Shuttle Program Scientist. ISS seems to have followed a different scheme.
To me it looks like ISS has become confused between research and the integration process for flying research.
I’d guess that for someone coming in from the outside and uninitiated they would have a hard time trying to figure out what they would need to do or who to talk to. The people who publicize the ISS program seem to all be scientists out of the science office. But I am not sure they actually conduct any science.
This leads to Daniel Woodard’s question.
The ISS Program Office is very large, they have a large budget, which means they have a lot of people. I don’t think the money that was absorbed from all those research codes was ever reapplied to research. In that case it is all going to operate ISS.
ISS is a facility situated in a fairly static environment. There is a continuous flow of activity, with crews coming and going, several small logistics missions, about one every other month. On Shuttle there were big campaigns geared to every flight. ISS seems to be more of a constant, low activity level. Each Shuttle flight’s campaign was geared to launch and landing a different mission, different payloads and support and a new crew with a lot of specialized training requirements. It would be an interesting comparison between Shuttle and ISS manpower levels and functions. The two programs budgets are similar, so I suspect manpower would be similar.
As far as getting the money, I suspect that if ISS were better organized, they probably would have the manpower and the money that is required to support research.
At least in its formative years, and for the first several years of flight, the Shuttle program was a smaller program office and relied upon technical expertise from across the NASA institution. The large ISS Program office today appears to have a lot of organizations with overlapping technical functions. Apparently there is a gap when it comes to a clear and straightforward payload integration process or organization.
Can you “get the people back”. There are a few of those people experienced on earlier programs you might be able to find-would the ISS Program listen to what they had to say? Those earlier programs were over a long time ago.
I think one of the key problems NASA has today is that NASA needs to decide what their job is as NASA?
I think that the current NASA leadership has said that aside from human research to support exploration, NASA no longer wants a role in research in earth orbit. I find this troubling since several prior generations of NASA leaders said this was NASA’s job and they built the systems to support the job in LEO. I am all for commercializing to simplify interfaces and save money. That is simply a different procurement method. NASA could simplify its own internal interfaces and save money too. Even if the ISS were operated commercially, it doesn’t preclude government leadership of research. Many other government agencies lead research.
NASA though, says that instead of research, they want to lead “exploration”. Apollo was a neat program-done not for exploration but for political purposes. Even in its midst, the nation decided Apollo was unaffordable and the curtailment of the production of lunar vehicles started years before the first Apollo moon flights. But now, and for the last ten years, NASA has said they are reestablishing Apollo. Yet, from the announced schedules, it looks like there won’t be any NASA human exploration missions for decades. Will it take all the people and money NASA HSF has now to do the few exploration missions planned for the next couple decades?
There is not a lot of visionary or strategic leadership going on in NASA now, or for the last decade.
The job NASA says it no longer wants to do is the job they have outsourced to CASIS which is all the LEO research except for what is tied to human exploration missions. Does CASIS know how to do the job? Did CASIS get any of those experienced people from prior programs? I’ve not seen any signs of it.
Thanks. But that was sort of a view from the top. I was thinking more of the view from the bottom. If I had an idea for an experiment and wanted to build it and have it flown on ISS, what would I do? (I don’t, although I could probably think of some good ideas. I just want to know how the system works.)
If i had an idea for a sounding rocket experiment, I’d go to the appropriate web page (nspires.nasaprs.com), look up the appropriate solicitation (e.g. SpaceTech-REDDI-2016-F1, if it was a technology development experiment; actually that’s closed, so I’d have to wait for a -2017 solicitation), write a proposal and submit it by the specified deadline. There is material on line about everything I need to describe in the proposal. If selected, I’d get funding to develop the experiment, and NASA would provide the rocket and launch/operations support for the flight. This is open to anyone (well, anyone employed by an US institution willing to have the proposal submitted in their name, but that can be just about any sort of educational, commercial or government institutions.) If my institution is willing to pay, they solicitation allows for “cost sharing” (i.e. splitting the bill.) I think, although it would be unusual, I could submit a budget that was $0 from NASA and the rest from my institution. I doubt they would do that, but the solicitation allows for it. I suppose there would be some intellectual property issues if the proposing institution wanted to fund everything and keep the results proprietary.
That’s basically how it works if you want to fly an experiment on a sounding rocket. I was wondering what the analogous process is for experiments on ISS (or if such a process exists.)
Thanks for a great answer that summarizes decades very clearly. I remember how one of the FCRs in JSC Bldg 30 was changed into a Telescience Center to work with science on the ISS. Lord knows what that cost. As far as I know, it was never used for that purpose. I wonder if that happened around the time of the philosophy switch you mention…
You DO understand that 99.97% of CASIS’ budget is NASA money, right? They slap overhead on it. Far more efficient to keep the NASA money at NASA and dispense if from there – especially if all CASIS can do is get cartoon characters to endorse ISS research.
By “in person”, perhaps he is channeling Gov. LePage?