Why Is It So Hard For NASA To Explain What ISS Does?
The correct answer is about 2,100!
Learn more about the results of more than 20 years of station research here: https://t.co/U6LSw3BkPP pic.twitter.com/38ySJMvjpP— ISS Research (@ISS_Research) January 7, 2020
Keith’s note: This tweet refers to “Publication Metrics from the International Space Station Results“, a 6 January 2020 page which attempts to show how much research has been accomplished on the ISS. As you all know people outside of NASA constantly ask what it is those astronauts do up there. Alas, as is the case with all NASA research conducted by various directorates, missions, division, centers, and projects, no one at NASA truly has a central collection of ISS research data. Why? Because NASA cannot cooperate internally and externally to make this happen. Over the decades I have watched people try to pull it all together in one place. Invariably one effort collides with another group trying to do the same thing. Cooperation is not always the obvious solution since both efforts have separate funding streams and cooperating would lead to a cut in funding. So the building of independent data stovepipes continues.
There are some ISS research resources that NASA promotes to the public. But there are others, of great utility, that NASA goes out of its way to ignore – even though they are often more illustrative and linked to more of NASA’s ISS research than the things NASA wants you to see. Two of those resources are NASA Spaceline Current Awareness and NASA’s PubSpace.
Neither NASA’s ISS National Laboratory, Publication Metrics from the International Space Station Results, Space Station Research & Technology, ISS Benefits for Humanity, Let’s Explore Space Station Science, or Space Station Research Results Citations Resources link or make any mention of PubSpace or Spaceline Current Awareness.
If you go to the CASIS/ISS National Laboratory website or its publications page neither PubSpace or Spaceline Current Awareness are referenced or linked to either. In fact CASIS only makes one link back to one of NASA’s ISS pages here on a sub page under their Research header link. NASA is not exactly linking up a storm to CASIS either.
Of course if you go to the NASA Spaceline Current Awareness page it makes zero linkage back to NASA or CASIS. Nor does it link to PubSpace. The NASA Spaceline page is hosted at NASAPRS. You will note that their archive only goes back to 2003. The only place you can currently find a complete archive of the Spaceline reports is on our SpaceRef website here – all the way back to 1996.
Historic note: NASA started a service to catalog space biology research results back in the late 1980s when I worked in the life sciences division as a space biologist at NASA HQ. Ron Dutcher and Janet Powers at USHUS saw this project through hard times – even when funding often disappeared. I took it upon myself to grab all of their reports when their site went dark for a while in the late 1990s/early 2000s and have kept it all online ever since. A few years back Spaceline found a new home at NASAPRS where it is maintained along the same lines of excellence that have characterized this labor of love since the 1980s.
Federal law enacted a few years back managed that all government funded research be made public in a fashion readily accessible. NASA chose to intergate its various research result collections with the PubMed Central (PMC) repository which is hosted by The National Institutes of Health. That resource is called PubSpace. PubSpace does not link back to NASA or CASIS pages on ISS research. Nor does it link to Spaceline.
Of course there is more to ISS research than life and microgravity science. There’s stuff out on the truss looking out at the universe and back at Earth. The NASA Astrophysics Data System has lots of stuff about this. A simple search for “space station” shows that. Then there’s the arXiv.org preprint server. A search for “space station” yields results there too. None of the NASA websites referenced above mention either of these resources even though NASA either funds the service an/or funds a vast portion of the research they contain.
There’s something rather broken with the way that NASA coordinates all of its research result outreach efforts. When you visit one of them it is as if the others do not even exist.
So here we are. NASA is trying to promote the whole LEO commercialization thing with the ISS as a keystone on this effort. NASA tries to turn ISS off and give it to the private sector but Congress responds by extending its life and telling NASA to pay for it. Now NASA wants to build a mini-space station called Gateway in cislunar space to operate in parallel with ISS. Indeed Gateway is already being marketed in some ways as a way to do the sort of things that are done on ISS. As noted above there is a constant questioning of why we need a space station and what value it provides. NASA tries to respond to these inquiries but always manages to trip when it comes to making the big decisions required to truly explain – to a variety of audiences – what space stations do. Everyone has a different story. Some of the explanations resonate. Others do not.
NASA wants to establish a permanent human research presence in lunar orbit and on the surface and go to Mars and all that other stuff. If NASA cannot get itself on the same page regarding the whole cost/benefit equation in LEO on an established platform like ISS, then it is improbable that they will ever pull a cohesive plan together to explain the lunar and Mars things.
A good place to start would be to synchronize all NASA and NASA-funded space station outreach into a coordinated package with a single entry point – not a swarm of unconnected and independent efforts.
To name but a few:
1) Because the average American basically does not understand the scientific process, its cycles, its incremental advancement, how it works and what should be expected as results (tangible or not);
2) NASA sells the “science” as if it were a magical box of something tangible;
3) The resulting scientific information and technology demonstrations are likely not something that will directly effect the average Americans life today or even tomorrow;
4) Our culture has growing deficits in patience and attention-span, and is increasingly consumed by submitting to instant-gratification, which today hinders the understanding or acceptance of the scientific process;
5) There is a lack of a clear, long-term goal, which is road marked by clear, short-term attainable goals that regularly show advancement towards said goal has been accomplished;
6) Commitment to space exploration is not appropriately funded.
Totally agree on #1. It’s not just America either.
Re #5, I don’t think a science lab needs a clear long-term goal. Some great science can come out of blue-sky thinking, and it is appropriate to have labs that facilitate that. Whether ISS should be one of those or not is a separate question, but this point is important to understand the scientific process raised in #1. Science does not need to have a goal any greater than doing basic research.
Unfortunately, funding for science has gone in the opposite direction in the past half-century. Funded proposals (and flight missions) are expected to have clearly defined questions which they will answer. As in, “There are two conflicting theories about X. By measuring Y we will determine which one is correct.” Otherwise, you aren’t likely to get funding. The days of just going out and looking are largely over. Well, naturally, people build in the ability to do that and they certainly use it. But the funding is largely justified by answering specific, identified questions.
Outside of the US, I understand that may be different. I’ve heard scientists from the United Kingdom express concern about this with regard to Brexit. The funding from the EU does run to big, long-term grants to a lab or research group as a whole, to do a bunch of good work (not too specifically described in the proposal) along certain lines. But the funding from the UK tends to be on focused questions or objectives. The EU funding won’t be available to scientists in the UK, starting in a few weeks.
Yes, I understand. Like elsewhere, in Australia we have largely competitive grants schemes too. Positively, there are some less-specific schemes to support basic research (eg, the Research Block Grants and National Institutes programmes).
How much of the science on ISS isn’t human microgravity health research?
I have no idea. If I were to ask NASA I doubt there is anyone who can give me a solid answer and if I asked 5 people at NASA who are supposed to know I’d get 7 answers.
As you said, the ‘turf wars’ have been going on for decades. I do not see that ever ending.
Long term Solar Irradiance science going on…Critical for Earth Radiation Budget Research
http://lasp.colorado.edu/ho…
The solar irradiance monitor is an interesting example. I’n not entirely sure, but I believe most or all of the funding came from the Science Mission Directorate, not the ISS budget. After the astronauts mounted it and turned it on, I think it’s basically run on its own, with ISS doing little more than provide power and relay the data. So is that ISS science? If so, is a CubeSat sent up on a Dragon and launched from ISS by a NanoRacks deployer doing ISS science? And, in terms of tracking publications, do people doing experiments like that send their bibliography to the ISS project office?
Not sure of funding source, probably not out of ISS budget considering here are a few more examples of “science” payloads operating “on” ISS. Keyword “on”. I don’t think a CubeSat launched from ISS would qualify as science enabled by ISS as a hosted payload, but maybe they at ISS project would count it. However, TSIS, SAGEIII, and NICER are all science missions “on” the ISS other than the OP’s statement of “human microgravity health research”. I would suspect that funding is through Earth Science, Heliophysics, Astrophysics.
Links:
https://www.nasa.gov/nicer
https://eosweb.larc.nasa.go…
As Keith points out, calculating a metric is well nigh impossible because all the papers aren’t listed in one place. However, there’s things like Cold Atom Lab, RapidScat, Ecostress, and SCaN Testbed which are ISS based and not human health research.
PubMed is a great resource for NIH, but it might be interesting to see how long it took for it to become so. Back in the 70s & 80s you hiked to the library and pored through volumes of Index Medicus (which started in the 1800s).
I suspect there is a lot of “embellishment” of results and significance. There is also a lot of repetition of technology demos that are really of little significance, yet which make up a preponderance of on-orbit ISS activity. Frankly there are not enough useful things for the astronauts to do, and which require the astronauts; many experimenters avoid astronaut involvement because of resource (time) constraints and reliability. What NASA does not seem to do effectively is get the message of the capabilities and the availability to prospective researchers. Is there a user’s guide? NASA is to busy crowing about all the wonderful; results they are getting to a lot of experiments or demonstrations that probably are of no real significance that they are missing the boat on getting things developed that might be of value. Its amazing we are still bringing these things up after 20 years of orbital operations and in a program that has now gone on for 35 years. While the debate about the value and necessity of a station in LEO continues after 50 years, NASA has yet to legitimately explain why another station, one in deep space or near the Moon in some peculiar ‘halo’ orbit is needed at all. It has nothing to do with needing a station out there; it has much more to do with the capabilities that the vehicles they’ve already developed do not have. NASA ‘has gone off the rails’. They are developing a system that rightly no one would need if they’d been doing the job up til now that was required. I keep thinking back to that mid-70s report in which they said a small station to do some research and which would be relatively inexpensive to develop, build and maintain would be a viable need but the big Station they built was as much a jobs program. Having another station is just redundant and should have been un-necessary. I am hoping that Mr. Lovarro will resolve this, soon.
One interesting statistic, which I’ve suggested before, is an h index for missions. For people who aren’t academics, that’s a figure based on both the number of papers someone’s written and how often they are cited. And h index of N means N papers which have been cited N or more times. Publishing 20 papers which have all been cited 20 or more times is a 20. If you’ve published 80 other papers, cited 19 or fewer times, it’s still a 20. For scientists, that’s a commonly calculated figure (and automatically generated, by sites like Web of Science). It would be interesting to see the similar numbers by mission rather than by scientist. But I’ve never seen someone calculate those numbers.
2100 papers over 20 years is what one would expect for a small facility. While it’s not really fair since the ISS isn’t strictly actually a science mission, this comes to something like $50M/paper. I know it sounds ridiculous, but at least for ground-based telescopes and astrophysics missions, dollars (full budget expenditure)/paper count (peer-reviewed) is actually one of the metrics I know for certain gets used during the mission senior reviews where the projects fight for funding. These typically come in at around $50k-100k/paper. I wonder what fraction of the ISS budget is notionally “for science operations”?
It’s a little bit more expensive for the larger, robotic missions. The Cassini project was claiming 3948 papers by end of mission, and that’s $1 or $2 million per paper (depending on which cost estimate you like.) I can think of a CubeSat that was in the price range you mention, but $50 to $100 thousand sounds more like what I’d expect from a terrestrial lab or observatory. But, yes, $50 million per paper is way out there.
You’re right – if I take the _full_ cost of HST including the refurbishments I get something closer to the ballpark $500k. Keck comes in at almost exactly $100k.
$160 B / 2,100 research papers = $76 M / paper !!
CERN cost ~10 billion and produces that many papers a year. The ISS is an incredible boondoggle and waste of resources that has crippled the agency.