Crisis at CASIS: New Opportunities or Looming End Game?
Keith’s note: Last week after the conclusion of the ISS Research and Development Conference in Atlanta, the chairman of the CASIS board of directors stepped down. The board is now being run on an interim basis by several other board members. Changes in CASIS senior management are likely. Further changes at CASIS are also to be expected. There are many skilled and dedicated people at CASIS who are up to the task of fixing things – so this is not necessarily a bad thing. Meanwhile CASIS stakeholders at NASA, in Congress, industry, and the scientific community are all talking about what should be done to fix things at CASIS and the ISS.
NASA is currently proposing the construction of a mini-space station (Gateway) in cis-lunar space that will be operated by NASA with the assistance of the private sector. If NASA cannot make public/private, commercial/scientific efforts function successfully in LEO on board a fully operational and well-understood platform like ISS then the chances that NASA can do the same thing a quarter of a million miles away – building upon ISS experience – are questionable to say the least.
Personally I think that the ISS is the ‘undiscovered country’ and that we have yet to fully tap its potential. Hopefully NASA and its various stakeholders and partners will take this opportunity to re-examine how utilization of ISS is conducted, fix what is broken, and build upon what works. A fully enabled and utilized ISS can be a crucial stepping stone along the path of the human exploration of the solar system. Not making the most of the ISS could result in a large pothole in that path.
What groundbreaking discoveries have been made so far? Things that can be commercialized.
I think that’s the underlying problem: there hasn’t been much, if anything, of that kind.
Some ideas have just become obsolete. Consider protein crystallization. The hot technology for that is now electron diffraction on extremely small microcrystals, or even individual protein molecules. Microgravity has no place in that.
https://blogs.sciencemag.or…
“Gonen mentioned that some of the protein crystals that they’ve been working with are only about ten protein molecules on a side, and they’re pulling up to two-Angstrom resolution structures out of them. Try that with X-rays, if you want, but prepare for disappointment. “
That’s not a particularly useful metric, if you’ll forgive me – suitability for ‘commercialization,’ I mean.
There’s a longer term point to be made here. Forgiving my simplification, science begins with relentless observation, during which the observer will notice an unusual event, exclaiming, not ‘Eureka!’, but something more akin to ‘that’s weird…’ *
A scientist, in her lab, curiously following her interests. That’s where the magic happens. Sometimes an odd mix of goal-oriented research leads us to the deepest possible questions, and answers, as it did for Wilson and Penzias. Other times, commercialization follows quickly, as in the case of the transistor.
But in the end, nobody knows the best way to trick science into making money, other than this: support our scientists wherever they work, giving her the intellectual freedom to follow her nose.
Here’s a sense of what the girls and boys are doing up there:
https://scholar.google.com/…
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I stole this phrase from a podcast of the British Interplanetary Society (BIS), a source I’ve mentioned before.
The most significant issue I see-and have seen for many years, is events like the ISS R&D Conference. Mainly NASA and CASIS send their people to space conferences in which they preach to the choir how wonderful ISS is. Most of the people they are talking to really don’t matter because they are already space cadets, already know about ISS, and by and large, are not ISS users. Usually they are making money off of ISS contracts. NASA and CASIS need to be going to industries where there might be prospects for more utilization. If they don’t do that , they are not even looking for new “customers”.
Keith, do you really think that the NASA overhead of running the Space Station has value after 2024? No, I mean, I am asking a question. What do you think? Should it go commercial and NASA stop spending tax payer money on aging workforce to watcht it?
The studies that NASA asked for said, in essence, that lots of companies will use ISS if NASA pays to keep it operational. None of them wanted to pay the full cost of operating it. Add in the fact that Congress wants to keep it operational until 2028 or longer then it behooves everyone to find a way to strike a balance so as to use this resource to the fullest possible extent.
It would be interesting to see the cost breakdown for ISS operations, and a study that would show how to reduce it.
That said, ISS was never designed with cost of operations as an important element. It was designed to give the Space Shuttle a mission and to keep the Russian space agency intact, so it won’t be surprising if its impossible to commercialize it.
One of the complications is that the ISS is a space vehicle that is flown from the ground. It takes teams of people to do that, many of them working on 24/7 shifts. Flying a spaceship, especially a large complicated human inhabited one like ISS is a unique specialty, the challenge is finding a company that is both capable and willing to do it. Would a different design have made it at least a little less challenging to operate? Possibly, but in the end you are still limited to companies that are capable of operating a crewed spaceship, which narrows the choices down quite a bit.
In the early days when we were trying to justify Station we did a lot of research into the industries and companies and the kinds of research they’d be doing. NASA sponsored a lot of the academics who were dependent on government grants. Now it seem the NASA attitude is that they run the show but somebody else is in charge of utilization. Who would that be? I am not sure what makes me more mad-NASA and CASIS wasting their resources and not finding users, or them wasting the multi-tens of billions of dollars resource of the ISS that it took us 3 decades to get into space and operating.
CASIS illustrates why a separate public-private agency is needed to develop the Moon and its resources. Any efforts run by NASA will be no better than the efforts on the ISS.
Since Apollo NASA’s goal for human spaceflight has been to find a mission of infinite value to justify the nearly infinite cost of sending humans into space. Microgravity processes that have been proposed include “perfect” ball bearings, semiconductor crystals, latex beads, and protein crystals. Some have been the basis of interesting experiments but none have been economically viable because of the rapid progress in ground-based manufacturing and analytical technology. Basic research is valuable but not profitable, and basic research agencies like NIH and NSF are already starved for funds in this era when every research activity is supposed to be funded by venture capital and return on investment. When NASA itself (or CASIS for that matter) comes up with the funding there are a wealth of proposals. CASIS was in some ways given an impossible task, told to find private capital to support ISS research when NASA itself had failed to do so.
If the Trump Administration is willing to pry loose some of the money going into national prestige projects and use it to support science on the ISS, what would be most productive? Life sciences and microgravity science find only one unique tool on ISS, weightlessness, and while it can be useful the data that has been produced is limited. Earth and space observation permit unique observations that can only be performed from space with a flow of data limited only by downlink bandwidth, but experimenters I know with imaging payloads have not had an easy time getting funds or flight opportunities.