Its Not Good When Space Station Resources Go Unused
Larger image Source: CASIS FY17 Q2 Quarterly Report for the Period January 1 – March 31, 2017, page 12
Keith’s note: When it comes to the utilization of the U.S. National Laboratory aboard the International Space Station, its what CASIS does with the free resources that they are offered by NASA that counts. The most important, and often the most limited resource, is crew time. As you can see in the figure above, as of mid-2017, CASIS has had a hard time using all of the crew time that NASA has given to CASIS.
Starting in mid-2018 CASIS stopped including detailed summaries of their actual ISS utilization (including previous year’s percentages) in these quarterly reports to NASA. That’s somewhat less than transparent. Let’s see how they report how they have been doing in the past year. Stay tuned.
Larger image Source: CASIS FY18 Q2 Quarterly Report for the Period January 1 – March 31, 2018, page 22
This is admittedly just something I read, but I read that one of the problems with doing microgravity research on ISS is the vibrations in the station – from spacecraft docking with it (and periodically giving it boosts to maintain its altitude), from the crew moving around, from the life support systems. It really messes with more sensitive microgravity research, meaning that there’s less of it that can be done there. Maybe that’s part of why CASIS is struggling to fill its astronaut time space.
I don’t know about ISS in particular, but that’s one reason earlier stations had problems with research. It’s not just microgravity research; early plans for orbital observatories shifted to robotic spacecraft when astronomers realized what a difference it made in pointing stability. But that can be reduced by planning. All those dockings and reboosts have some amount of time flexibility. You can schedule them to give the microgravity work a clear week. That does place limits on the duration of the experiments, and it does require coordination between the research program and station operations. And there are many sorts of microgravity experiments which don’t need very high quality microgravity.
This was a concern when I had to worry about this at NASA. Today experiments are vibroacoustically isolated at the rack and payload level if they are sensitive to external vibroacoustics and crew time and activity can be tweaked if need be. But that is not the issue here. CASIS simply cannot provide enough payloads for the crew to work on despite the crew allocation that has been set aside for CASIS.
wow just think .. they created 110 billion in value and didn’t even have to use all the astronaut time.. just think how much value there would have been if they had used it all?
Does this under-utilization represent management failure? MaybeThe earliest days of ISS, and indeed Freedom, asked a simple question: “What sort of research would be done on a space station?”
To some, the answer was painfully obvious, needing not explication. Does anyone remember how often words like ‘crystals!’ were blurted out? Or ‘pharmaceuticals!”? The very ‘obviousness’ of research opportunities was cited as an important justification for the construction of this very expensive laboratory.
Many years later, we have learned much about orbital space stations. We know that they are devilishly expensive; that maintenance sucks up a huge proportion of astronaut time. Others here are much more fully informed; but they do point to the difficulties of experimental isolation.
Perhaps most importantly we’ve gained essential, longterm experience operating a very complex device while sharing responsibilities internationally.
We have learned that an orbital station requires radically unique management protocols. We have also learned that we really don’t know in many ways what those management protocols are.
NASA’s move to empower CASIS was the right policy move, in my view, the result of correctly diagnosing management missteps by NASA that resulted in under utilization, for one.
And in many ways, management of ISS’ research activities is an on-going experiment in itself. Indeed ISS management is at best a moving target.
There’s little comparable, though landslide operations are helpful. And while the appalling behavior of CASIS isn’t excusable, off-loading management to an arms-length entity that can continue to develop correct techniques (and given the latitude to do so) is positive.
So, take the very hard-earned data, make adjustments, and move forward.
NASA has been at it (ISS) for 20 years-in orbit and another 20 years before that during which time they thoroughly analyzed the need for LEO research capacity and sponsored a lot of the development work-until the current NASA leadership redirected the research money to the contractor. CASIS has been at it for years. From what I can see they do not know how to go about signing up researchers.
The question I would want an answer to is if they are aggressively going after potential customers or merely waiting for them to come knock on their door. It would be nice to see their marketing plan and strategy.
Very interesting data.
Is the problem CASIS? Or is the problem broader and more complex? Perhaps the problem is a lack of demand?
The underutilization of ISS reminds me of the busted hope that the Space Shuttle would dramatically reduce payload launch costs. The pretty theory behind the ISS has met the harsh reality of actual experience.
I wonder if part of this is the experiment pipeline and what it encourages or discourages – The trend is to design your hardware and software so it doesn’t require astronaut intervention – it makes your experiment schedule less dependent on astronaut schedules and workload. Just like on the ground. It’s not clear what unique capabilities are provided and what experiments are enabled having an astronaut available. Clearly, in the area of fault recovery, the ability to swap components, or reload a batch of reagents, etc. might be helped by having astronauts.
The other aspect might be the somewhat complex scheduling of activities on ISS – it’s a big and busy place. There’s an ever changing panoply of operational restrictions for a variety of reasons. You might have put a payload up 5 years ago with good utilization, and now the operational environment has changed and it’s deemed potentially unsafe to operate most of the time because of conflicts with other activities (or just that nobody has had time/budget to do the safety analysis).