CASIS Clarifies Its Expansion Ambitions

CASIS Announces Its Commercial Business Expansion Plans, earlier post (March 2019)
“CASIS Chief Strategy Officer Richard Leach made a presentation “Forecasting the 2024-2035 Space Based National Laboratory for Life and Physical Sciences Space Research” at the National Academies of Science Committee on Biological and Physical Sciences in Space meeting yesterday. During that presentation he announced that CASIS aka The ISS National Laboratory has expanded their scope of operations. They are now going to expand well beyond the ISS even though their cooperative agreement with NASA prohibits such an expansion.” (larger chart image)

Keith’s note: Today CASIS Chief Strategy Officer Richard Leach made a presentation at an event hosted by the US Chamber of Commerce titled “Commercial Opportunities Aboard ISS National Laboratory and Future Gateway“. I asked Leach about these charts which say “ISSNL can support a broad set of microgravity research platforms: new orbital platforms (crewed, crew-tended, free flyers, cis-lunar); sub-orbital vehicles; parabolic flight; balloons; drop towers; ground-based laboratories; and big data platforms”. Specifically I asked how CASIS planned to proceed with this strategy in light of NASA’s recent ISS commercialization plan and the fact that neither the CASIS charter or its cooperative agreement with NASA specify that CASIS can do these things. Leach replied that this chart was meant to show what CASIS could possibly do and that it would need new agreements and buy in from its stakeholders. Full audio below: