This is not a NASA Website. You might learn something. It's YOUR space agency. Get involved. Take it back. Make it work - for YOU.
Commercialization

CASIS May Be Nervous About Its Future on ISS

By Keith Cowing
NASA Watch
July 24, 2018
Filed under ,

NASA Watch founder, Explorers Club Fellow, ex-NASA, Away Teams, Journalist, Space & Astrobiology, Lapsed climber.

One response to “CASIS May Be Nervous About Its Future on ISS”

  1. Richard Brezinski says:
    0
    0

    I thought CASIS was hired to market the ISS in a manner that NASA felt they couldn’t since NASA is government, cannot directly support commerical interests, can inform and educate but not market, etc. But from what I can tell mainly CASIS follows NASA’s lead and just augments whatever NASA is already doing.

    There are some groups like Nanoracks who are legitimately recruiting researchers. Maybe NASA ought to pay Nanoracks since they seem to know what needs to be done and are doing the job?

    Like, there is an ISS R&D conference in San Francisco this week and mainly it seems like the ISS people are talking to the ISS people about what the NASA people are doing on the ISS. They do it in the name of spreading word about the science being accomplished. But all the scientists I know, love to tell the world about the science they are doing. Their job is telling people what they learn in their research. Why is NASA and its contractor doing that? Why is NASA paying a contractor to do that?

    I have a hard time reconciling why NASA has such a large number of people trying to ‘market’ the science results. At one time NASA had a lot of academic grant programs, commercial development centers; and different kinds of cooperative research agreements; NASA directly sponsored the scientists, the science and technology development. Now NASA seems to be spending a lot of money on contractors who try to tell what the scientists are doing rather than sponsoring the scientists. It leads me to wonder whether there is any real science going on, where are the scientists, and whether anything real has been learned on ISS? Is this even the proper role of NASA? Usually the government sponsors R&D that is not yet expected to produce a pay-off but which might be promising. Once an ROI is anticipated, that is when corporations go to work.

    I wonder if this is why there don’t seem to be too many big accomplishments to report on? And is this the right strategy; to pay for NASA’s own people to communicate the science rather than sponsoring the science? Are all these NASA contractors really just marketing contractors if they are not scientists? Is that NASA’s job? Is it even legal?