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Commercialization

CASIS Had A Board Meeting Today

By Keith Cowing
NASA Watch
February 8, 2019
Filed under , ,
CASIS Had A Board Meeting Today

Keith’s note: CASIS, sometimes also known as the ISS National Laboratory (depending who you talk to), held a board meeting today in Washington, DC. In a nutshell, while they have spent a lot of money and time erasing “CASIS” from their branding, websites, and publications, they admitted that they are not changing their name – even if they are. They also claimed that there have been no discussions of setting up a commercial entity even though multiple sources tell me that they have had these conversations with and about this topic and CASIS. I had a short exchange with Joe Vockley, the executive director of CASIS.

Some Twitter notes from the event today:

Earlier posts
CASIS Now Has An Official Fictitious Name
CASIS Is Changing Its Name But It Missed A Few Things (update)
CASIS Is Changing Its Name By Pretending That Its Not
Why Is CASIS Making Itself Disappear?

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

6 responses to “CASIS Had A Board Meeting Today”

  1. Michael Spencer says:
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    CASIS always seemed like a dumb name to me, although it is descriptive (“Center for the Advancement of Science in Space”), and it is keeping in NASA’s fine tradition of silly acronyms. Which reminds me of Monty Python.

    I’ll stop now.

    Wikipedia says “The Center for the Advancement of Science in Space, or CASIS, is a US government-funded national laboratory, with principal research facilities located in the United States portion of the International Space Station.”

    Very descriptive, and a very shiny new url to match, too, at least I think it’s new: https://www.iss-casis.org/, although if you go to oasis.org you are forwarded to https://www.issnationallab.org, which is the same that happens if you go to http://www.iss-casis.org/. This all seems very normal to me for an organization trying to sweep inquiries to a single url.

    I never understood the scope of this organization anyway.

    • Steve Pemberton says:
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      What Wikipedia page are you looking at? The main CASIS article that I am looking at reads much differently:

      “The Center for the Advancement of Science in Space (CASIS), a non-profit organization, is the manager of the International Space Station United States National Laboratory”

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wi

      Also as I’m sure you know Wikipedia articles can be written by virtually anyone. There are controls and flags when articles contain errors or unattributed statements, but that tends to happen on higher profile articles, items of low interest often go unchallenged for a long time.

      A common occurrence on Wikipedia is for groups to write their own Wikipedia article. You often see this with articles about companies. Although hard to prove, the symptom is an “advertisement” style of the article. Often this gets flagged and the author is requested to modify the article to read less like an advertisement. I think the CASIS Wikipedia article needs to be flagged for having an advertising style because it contains statements like:

      “Since CASIS began managing the National Lab in 2011, the organization has…”

      “The mission of CASIS is…”

      “CASIS currently contributes to a space-based economy, serving the academic and industrial research communities by…”

      The entire article seems to have a positive, promotional spin to it, and there is no mention of any controversy. However hidden on the page is a little gem. In the fifth paragraph is the statement:

      “In July 2017, NASA extended the contract with CASIS to manage the US National Lab through September 2024.[2]”

      When you click on the source link [2] you are suddenly confronted with a quite scathing assessment of CASIS by the NASA OIG in January 2018 (reported by Keith at the time). Read that report and you will get an eye-opening view of the ongoing problems with CASIS. None of the information in the report is mentioned in the Wikipedia article although it should be. At minimum a mention of the report and its conclusions should be included in the article.

      • fcrary says:
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        That’s not quite fair to Wikipedia. Articles can be edited by anyone, as well as written by anyone. That improves accuracy and removes bias in many cases. If a few interested people, from anywhere in the word, are willing to keep an eye on an article and correct obviously biased content, then the biases do tend to get weeded out.

        You would not believe the back and forth over things like the Falcon 9/Zuma launch (was it a launch success and payload failure, a partial launch failure or a complete launch failure?), Musk’s Tesla in Space, or similar things. But it did, eventually sort itself in a reasonably unbiased way.

        I was also pleasantly surprised by some work by a ULA employee. She didn’t put in any edits. She drafted them, posted them to the ULA article’s talk page, explained that she thought they were correct and unbiased, but knew she shouldn’t be adding them since she worked for ULA. Then she requested someone else to add them. For the most part, they were. I did say some of it was a bit verbose, but another regular editor didn’t mind. And I did add that Vandenberg SLC2 was no longer in use by ULA, since the retirement of the Delta II last September. That’s sort of how we try to make Wikipedia work.

        But it does depend on interested people taking the time. The flags don’t really help, in my experience, because there are easy ways for interested editors to monitor recent edits without the flags; the flags are mostly noticed by people who don’t regularly follow a particular article or subject. And if no one really cares other than one biased source (or if one biased source has more free time on his hands than those who disagree), then there will be problems.

        In the case of the CASIS article, you’ve spotted quite a bit of content in a referenced source. Content that is more negative than the text of the article. That really should be corrected. Since anyone can edit that article, that means you can. That doesn’t even require an account, although totally anonymous (although identified by IP address) edits may be on hold for someone with an account to approve. Editing the text is pretty simple. References aren’t as easy, but in this case, adding:
        <ref name=”:2″/>
        after anything you add will reference the same OIG report. If you do decide to make some edits, please use the “Edit Summary” field to say something informative.

  2. ThomasLMatula says:
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    CASIS and CCP are good examples of why NASA is not going to be the entity to develop commercial markets in LEO, or beyond. NASA culture and commercialization are just not compatible. So it’s not surprising there is no serious effort to try to commercialize it, NASA is counting on ISS supporters in Congress to keep it flying forever just as it is.

  3. Brian_M2525 says:
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    I think the idea of CASIS goes back to the mid 1990s and work by Barbara Mikulski and Mark Uhran to try and commercialize operations on ISS.

    The idea was similar though not quite the same as the Spacehab commercial program in the earlier 1990s. Spacehab started, originally intending to be a passenger module for the Shuttle. After the Challenger accident that idea went away. Code C [commercialization] of NASA sponsored dozens of Centers for Commercial Development around the US to help develop payloads to fly on Shuttle. Most Centers were affiliated with universities. They received millions of NASA dollars to develop payloads-most being spent by university engineering programs and going into student grants. A few of the Centers (e.g. in Wisconsin, Colorado, Florida, Alabama) were successful. When it looked like there would be an onslaught of new payloads for Shuttle, Code C signed a contract with Spacehab to provide all of the resources: pressurized volume, electrical power, trained crewmembers, etc. The original contract covered 6 Shuttle flights and 50 middeck locker equivalents on each flight at a cost between 15-20 million/flight. A lot of the universities took money but developed nothing and NASA stopped funding them and those Centers were shut down. Other Centers successfully developed payloads. Some of the payloads did not require sophisticated new hardware and were not large. Others did use racks. Some Centers sought hardware from other places including Shuttle student experiments, and found researchers to use them. Dozens of mostly small payloads did fly. Some of the Centers continue in operation even today.

    Unfortunately around the time ISS started seriously looking for payloads, the NASA ISS Program cut all of their payload funding. I think this was political naivete on the part of ISS management that ‘why should NASA sponsor payload development or research when other organizations like NIH or NRC are more ‘suitable’ for scientific research’. This is mainly a human space flight philosophy. On the science side of NASA they have no problem sponsoring scientific research, student grants, etc. In human space flight, the NASA human life science research program has pretty much cornered the market on scientific research so its done mainly in house, and they receive a substantial budget for that purpose.

    NASA human space flight wanted to put their money into ISS engineering contracts (I am not sure why since by this time a lot of ISS engineering was completed or bartered off to the internationals, but it made the ISS contractors happy to receive more money for having to do little, and it made the ISS Program management happy to have larger budgets at their disposal. The only problem was that there were few payloads to fly.

    The ISS National Lab payload resources were divided into a government half, accommodating mainly human life science research, and a ‘commercial’ half. NASA needed an organization to ‘independently’ manage those commercial ISS National Lab resources and help develop ‘commercial’ payloads. State of Florida, under the CASIS name, bid and won the NASA commercial contract. They put a lot of people who had zero experience with space flight integration, payloads or scientific research in charge. Based on Spacehab costs (around $18 million a Shuttle flight), CASIS was probably getting enough money but did not know what to do with it. Almost no one is sponsoring ‘commercial’ scientific research on ISS.

    ISS is still a national lab and about half its resources are used by NASA and other government agencies. About half its resources are available for ‘commercial use’ as managed by CASIS, but so far they have never come close to using a substantial portion.

    There are a number of issues.

    The integration process and documentation for flying payloads on ISS was far too difficult, time consuming and expensive and while a ‘smart’ CASIS might have helped fix the problem, as Spacehab did decades earlier, with the lack of talent in CASIS, they had no idea how to make the process work at all let alone improve it. They also did not have the right kind of people to market to the right sorts of companies or to academia to develop interest. Part of the problem was that people did not know the name CASIS and had no idea what CASIS was trying to do, because CASIS did not know for sure themselves what they needed to do.

    Several months ago CASIS ditched their Shuttle-pilot led scientific research and ISS science integration effort in favor of a scientist led effort. The new scientist in charge of CASIS apparently figured the ISS National Lab name would register with more people, however CASIS does not own all or even most of the ISS National Lab. There is a lot more to ISS than CASIS’ portion.

    As the IG has repeatedly pointed out CASIS has been doing a poor job in managing their portion. A lot of the problem comes back to NASA/ISS doing a poor job of managing the larger effort and as the IG pointed out, NASA makes almost no effort to manage CASIS,even though for all intents and purposes, CASIS is a NASA contractor. A lot of the problem comes back to there being almost no resources going into any kind of scientific research that would be done on ISS other than NASA’s own human life science effort. A lot of people do not like the new CASIS ISS National Lab name, because they are part of the ISS National Lab and CASIS does not represent them.

  4. Michael Spencer says:
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    You mean…that’s NOT what they…do?

    The new web site is something of an improvement; including a list of published papers would/cold be impressive.