NASA Orders A Review Of CASIS (Update)
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– Crisis at CASIS: New Opportunities or Looming End Game?, earlier post
– NASA Asked CASIS To Stop Paying Its Board Of Directors, earlier post
– Earlier CASIS posts
NASA to seek independent review of ISS National Laboratory
“However, a NASA letter to CASIS, dated Aug. 13 and obtained by SpaceNews, called for a “strategic pause in CASIS activities” while the independent review panel works “to ensure we are on mission and appropriately resourced to produce breakthroughs that improve lives on Earth.” The letter estimated the that review would take 12 weeks to complete. The letter also referenced a request by CASIS “to change or significantly reduce the availability of services” of Joseph Vockley, who is president and chief executive of CASIS and serves as principal investigator for NASA’s grant to CASIS to operate the ISS national lab. NASA said it was deferring that request until after “this strategic pause and assessment.” A source familiar with the situation said that the CASIS board recently sought to remove Vockley, a move that would require the concurrence of NASA.”
Keith’s note: I am told that the acting CEO of CASIS is CASIS COO Ken Shields. Sources also report that some final management decisions affecting senior leadership at CASIS – ones that require NASA concurrence – were put on hold last night. So these letters may have been superseded to some extent. Stay tuned.
Overdue….
Looks like they have been reading your website.?
I am glad to see finally some investigation. What/who was protecting them before?
This is possibly just in the nick of time. We don’t know for sure exactly how many years of ISS operation are left so it is important to begin maximizing its utilization as soon as possible.
It’s about time. Sadly, I doubt it will do any good.
Handwriting?
Meet wall..:
Kill it dead.
Having watched the people they’ve put in charge of CASIS over the years, and how they’ve operated, and the people at NASA who oversee the people at CASIS, it appears to be the blind leading the blind. None of them seem to know what they ought to be doing or how to go about it. They should have ad some people successful at marketing high tech. Marketing means directly approaching, and offering specific opportunities, and following through with technical integration support.
Exactly! If you want to develop a property you first develop a marketing strategy that you convert into a marketing plan. And to do this you need to hire marketing professionals to first research the markets for it. The “Field of Dreams” approach NASA is using on the ISS (“We built it, they will come”) has no hope of working. The problem is that if NASA actually hire marketing professionals to do such a study, true professionals who will give an honest answer, it MAY be the answer is there are no viable commercial markets for it.
“the ISS Nat’l Lab, managed by CASIS”
That’s a pretty deliberate bit of phrasing.
There’s a bigger issue here. Can a crewed, commercial station in LEO be profitable overall? There is quite a lot of evidence that the answer is either, “No” or if so, it would be very difficult. If it is very difficult or not possible then the frustration with CASIS not getting results might not be entirely the fault of CASIS. And more importantly, we need to make sure that, if we do a gapless transition to a commercial station in LEO then we need to wait until there is good evidence that it won’t turn out to be the next, perpetual subsidy drain on NASA’s budget.
And, is true commercialization really necessary before lunar development? There’s immediate resources on the Moon that isn’t present in LEO. So, those resources could significantly reduce the cost of maintaining and growing a lunar base whereas a LEO commercial station wouldn’t have that advantage nor demonstrate how that could be done. I’m calling for a fundamental questioning of the commercial space ideology when it comes to a crewed, commercial station in LEO.
Exactly.
I agree. But remember, commercial markets emerge at the price point where the demand curve meets the supply curve. If the price customers are ready, willing and able to pay something that is insufficient to cover the costs of supplying it, there will be no commercial market. The basic problem with most space commerce ventures is no one is willing to spend the money needed to do a proper market demand study, instead merely doing simplistic estimates based on guesses.
I’ve said it before, but Luxembourg and SES. They are pretty serious about in-space servicing and/or tugs, to support communications satellites. Including using asteroidal water to supply the tugs. They are serious enough about it to actually have studied what it would be worth to them, and how low the cost has to be for the idea to be viable. As I understand it, anything involving astronauts is almost certainly not going to be viable.
Probably not. And they also have to figure the decreasing cost to launch comsats thanks to SpaceX and it’s reusable systems. But then that will also lower costs for sending payloads to the Moon. That is what makes business so challenging, everything is in motion.
Sure. I didn’t say the studies would favor that sort of in space infrastructure. I just said someone with a real, commercial interest was doing serious studies of the costs and benefits. As you pointed out, that’s more than can be said of most ideas for space commerce (excepting more minor modifications to established markets like communications and remote sensing.)
I thought the whole commercialization of ISS idea came about only because NASA was asked how will they manage to pay for all of the big projects coming up and also maintain ISS, and from what I remember Gerst said something to the effect that they are confident that they can do it all, but are looking at different options including the possibility of letting commercial take over ISS operations if that is something that could work out. But as far as I know that idea never gained any real traction mainly due to the complexity of ISS and the massive cost to operate it.
The CASIS situation seems separate as they are tasked with managing the utilization of ISS in its current situation, and there is concern that after several years they have not met expectations. If there are justified reasons, i.e. things out of their control, then it could be that they are doing the best that anyone could do under those circumstances. But there seems to be quite a bit of evidence seen over the years that the underutilization is not fully explained by things out of their control. That is what the current review is attempting to determine.