ISS AND THE EMERGING SPACE ECONOMY

BY EDWARD GOLDSTEIN

When President Ronald Reagan directed NASA to build a “permanently manned space station,” he stated in his 1984 State of the Union Address that this initiative would “build on America’s pioneer spirit” and lead to peaceful, economic, and scientific gain. Reagan also contended, “A space station will permit quantum leaps in our research in science, communications, and in metals and lifesaving medicines which could be manufactured only in space.”

Reagan’s emphasis on commercial and economic opportunities reflected the maturation of the space program beyond the episodic human exploration missions of the 1960s and 1970s into an era of routine operations beginning in the 1980s, where the Space Shuttle was already demonstrating its utility for launching communications satellites into geosynchronous orbit and for enabling microgravity research in canisters labeled “Get Away Specials.” That same year, the Commercial Space Launch Act directed NASA to pursue commercial launch opportunities for its missions, which was another key step in opening up low-Earth orbit to commercial activities.

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket lifts off from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida, carrying the SpaceX Dragon resupply spacecraft. On its 14th commercial resupply services mission for NASA, Dragon delivered supplies, equipment, and new science experiments for technology research to the space station.

NASA PHOTO

Indeed, in NASA’s initial space station justification, of the eight functions the facility would serve, two were clearly oriented toward its commercial potential:

• A laboratory in space for the conduct of science and the development of new technologies.

• A manufacturing facility where human intelligence and the servicing capability of the station combine to enhance commercial opportunities in space.

This rationale has been a constant throughout the development, construction and assembly, and operations of the International Space Station (ISS), and the designation by Congress in 2005 of the U.S. segment of the ISS as a “National Laboratory.”

Today, it remains one of the most prominent reasons for keeping the ISS or something like it operating beyond 2024. And while the promise of new metals and miracle drugs has not yet been fully realized from microgravity research, the scope of commercial activity on the ISS has broadened well beyond what was anticipated when the space station was first proposed to include a wide range of commercial research investments in facilities, life sciences, physical sciences, remote sensing, technology development, and education. Areas of particular promise include stem cell research, “Cool Flames” – or flames that continue burning with no visible flame – which may enable rockets to burn fuel with more efficiency, and additive manufacturing.

This result was not predicted by computational models (based on high temperature chemistry) nor expected based on prior experimental work. This unique burning behavior highlights the need to better understand both low and intermediate temperature fuel chemistry and its effect on droplet combustion, having implications for spray combustion and fire safety. This unexpected observation has attracted international interest from researchers in academia, industry, and government laboratories.

A Made in Space Additive Manufacturing Facility (AMF) allows for immediate repair of essential components, upgrades of existing hardware, installation of new hardware that is manufactured, and the manufacturing capability to support commercial interests on the ISS. Additive manufacturing is the process of building a part layer-by-layer, with an efficient use of the material. The process, also known as 3D printing, leads to a reduction in cost, mass, labor and production time. The ISS crew would be able to utilize the AMF to perform station maintenance, build tools, and repair sections of the station in case of an emergency.

NASA astronaut Scott Tingle performs research operations with the Microgravity Science Glovebox inside the U.S. Destiny Laboratory module. Tingle was working on the Metabolic Tracking experiment that looks at a particular type of medicine and how it interacts with human tissue cultures. Results could improve therapies in space and lead to better, cheaper drugs on Earth.

NASA PHOTO

Considerable effort was made to refine existing NASA requirements documents. Volumes of documents were improved and condensed into a focused set of hundreds rather than thousands of requirements, Ven Feng, manager of NASA’s International Space Station Transportation Integration Office, explained.

“We put all of those into one book called the SSP 50808 [International Space Station to Commercial Orbital Transportation Services Interface Requirements Document]. That book is the same set of requirements that we use across the fleet of vehicles that come to the ISS. So it’s not only for Dragon and Cygnus, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency is using it for their follow-on HTV-X [unmanned cargo spacecraft for ISS resupply]. Sierra Nevada’s Dream Chaser is also using the same book, as are Boeing’s CST-100 and SpaceX’s Crew Dragon.”

In the grasp of the Japanese robotic arm, the CubeSat Deployer (upper right) releases a pair of NanoRacks CubeSat miniature satellites.

NASA PHOTO

Getting commercial oriented experiments up and down from the ISS is one thing; ensuring they are carefully tended once on orbit is another. “The way we are operating with the U.S. National Lab is 50 percent of NASA’s resources are dedicated to the National Lab and CASIS [the non-profit Center for the Advancement of Science in Space, which NASA designated in 2011 to manage the unique laboratory environment], where CASIS has developed the commercialization market,” noted Montalbano. “What that means is 50 percent of NASA’s resources goes to up National Lab mass, 50 percent of NASA’s crew time goes to National Lab and 50 percent of NASA’s down mass goes to National Lab. You can throw in power and data and everything you need to operate on the space station. We’ve allocated per Congress’ instruction 50 percent of NASA’s resources to build up the commercial market. We’re not finished and not even close to being finished, but we are taking steps to go in the direction of enabling markets that were unheard of before we had the space station.”

A ROBUST USER SEGMENT

For seven years, NASA, CASIS, and the American Astronautical Society have held an annual conference devoted to ISS research and development opportunities. At this year’s conference in San Francisco, said Brian Talbot, CASIS’ vice president of marketing, “we had nearly 1,000 attendees and most were nontraditional. Sometimes, when you go to typical space conferences you are just talking to yourself. At the ISS R&D Conference, we were talking to commercial, government, and academic researchers across a wide range of disciplines who have never done space-based research. For NASA and CASIS, that’s a huge indicator of both success and the potential for exciting space R&D to come in the next few years through the unique ISS opportunity.”

Astronaut Jack Fischer works with the Neutron Crystallographic Studies of Human Acetylcholinesterase for the Design of Accelerated Reactivators (CASIS PCG 6) experiment in the Japanese Experiment Module.

NASA PHOTO

For example, a conference workshop on using the ISS to support sustainable environmental practices featured a most unlikely investor in space research – the Target Corporation. Target and CASIS are sponsoring a “Cotton Sustainability Challenge” that provides researchers up to $1 million to run experiments on the ISS aimed at developing solutions for improving cotton crop production on Earth with fewer resource input requirements (i.e., irrigation). The challenge, said Talbot, demonstrates how the station can be used to further experimentation on “plant biology, raw material acquisition, water purification to remote sensing applications that farmers can use. There was a big awareness that we can use the International Space Station in a variety of ways to solve big challenges and one that is really on our doorstep is sustainability.”

Other participants in the workshop were also non-traditional space actors developing ISS experiments: Coca Cola, Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. (“Pushing the Limits of Silica Fibers for Tire Applications”), and Delta Faucets (ISS research to study formation of water droplets, water flow, and pressure in microgravity).

To give a sense of how extensively the ISS is being utilized for commercial purposes, in fiscal year 2017 more than half of the 76 payloads launched to the ISS National Lab involved commercial entities – from Fortune 500 companies like those above to new startups. Current projects are aimed at enabling lower engine emissions, higher-yield crop production, and new therapies for bone and muscle diseases.

To encourage the participation of startups with ISS research, ISS prime contractor Boeing and CASIS are sponsoring an accelerator called MassChallenge, which provides seed money for companies to help with hardware costs for flights to the ISS. The most recent MassChallenge grant awards went to Cellino Biotech, to investigate the potential to generate 200 to 500 million stem cells in microgravity for cell-based therapies for diseases such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and hemophilia; Guardian Technologies, to develop miniaturized ionizing radiation detectors to enable early and remote detection of possible radiological weapons threats; and Maker Health, for AmpliRx, a lightweight pharmaceutical manufacturing instrument for distributed, affordable, and scalable production of medications. “We get a unique perspective into early-stage space ventures,” said Warren Bates, CASIS’ director of business strategy & portfolio management. “We can then play the facilitator role to make matches between investors and these companies seeking capital. We had a pitch event at the ISS Research and Development Conference where we had 12 space startups pitch to a room of 75 people that contained investors with tens of billions of dollars under their control. We’re trying to increase the number of collisions between these innovative entrepreneurs and the people with the capital to accelerate the innovation in this ecosystem.” Bates added, “An exciting part of the ecosystem that we’ve also developed and will continue to develop is an online portal where companies seeking capital can host their investment opportunity with investors in this network that we’ve developed that’s now approaching 100 different investment groups. The system helps facilitate these contacts in a scalable way.”

NASA astronaut Andrew Feustel is seen in the Cupola, holding sample bags of crystals grown under experimental conditions controlled by middle and high school students as part of the CASIS PCG-9 investigation

NASA PHOTO

Talbot further explained that as opposed to CASIS’ early days, when it felt obligated to provide seed money to spur experimentation on the ISS, the organization for the past three years has operated on a “value impact construct.” “We reached out and worked with the experts that have done this before and got best practice analogues from other national labs, from academia, from the private sector and all over the place,” he said. “The value impact construct looks at economics, innovation, and humankind social benefit – what is returned to the American taxpayer. So we can now, based on the projects that have flown or are projected to fly, project things like incremental revenue and accelerated time to market, the number of new jobs, the total adjustable market, the number of innovation pathways.” Added Bates, “What we were trying to do was find ways to better target and select the most impactful research for us to undertake on the National Lab, but for us to be able to communicate the quality of it in a credible way and in terms that weren’t new metrics that we made up but in terms that other R&D organizations large and small, commercial and academic, use to describe the impact we are having.”

Another CASIS innovation Talbot noted is “Resource Utilization Planning.” “When I go out and target new companies and new projects, I understand where those utilization targets are by research increments there. I can tell you that for Expedition 57 and 58 I am fully utilized, that for Expeditions 59 and 60 I have a gap of three units of life science projects that are simple, which could be purchased for utilization experiments. We have gotten down to a level where we can understand not just the value and the impact of the project, but how to target projects that will drive utilization. When you look at our value impact portfolio quadrant to manage these projects, the top right is high-impact, high-feasibility. The top left is high-impact, higher-risk, the big step change innovation projects. The bottom right is the high-feasibility, low-impact. We are using all three of those quadrants to drive projects that will result in the optimal value and impact back to the nation, as well as driving full utilization. And if we can in an orderly fashion hit all of those goals, then we are blowing doors open on a commercially viable, necessary, and vital platform in low-Earth orbit.”

GROWTH OF IN-ORBIT COMMERCIAL FACILITIES

A large enabler of these ISS commercial research activities is not only the availability of space on the ISS National Lab, the allocation of significant crew time to operate experiments, and the increasing pace of cargo and resupply missions by NASA commercial cargo providers SpaceX, Northrop-Grumman Innovation Systems, and Sierra Nevada Corporation, but also the development by commercial providers of specific facilities for in-orbit operations.

Astronaut Alexander Gerst of ESA (European Space Agency) works inside the Japanese Kibo laboratory module retrieving protein crystal growth samples from a science freezer, also known as the Minus Eighty-Degree Laboratory Freezer for ISS (MELFI).

NASA PHOTO

I spoke to a pioneer in this field, Jeffrey Manber, the co-founder and CEO of NanoRacks, the first company to own and market its own hardware and services onboard the ISS, which now extend to the NanoRacks Internal Platform (NanoLabs), NanoRacks CubeSat Deployer, NanoRacks External Platform, and in 2019, the NanoRacks Airlock Module (Bishop), built with partners Boeing and Thales Alenia Space, which will be used for experiments and deployment of CubeSats and microsats. “The smartest folks in our industry just knew back in 2009 that the chances were the station would lose its funding by 2015,” he said. “That was the general policy at that time and so who would be foolish enough to make an investment in an unproven market to do something that had never been done before, when the current policy was to end funding in six or seven years? I felt there was no chance the space station would end in 2015 or 2016, and was willing to invest or gamble my own money that it would just sit there.”

Armed with the idea from two colleagues for a platform to house small research containers on the ISS, Manber recalled, “I approached NASA and said, ‘I don’t want your money. What I want is the right to build hardware, put it on the station, or buy it off the shelf, and market to whom I wish.’ Basically they agreed as long as it was safe and as long as it upheld the honor of the National Lab. In other words, no coffee mugs or stuff like that. …Today we have customers from 32 nations and we just celebrated over 700 payloads, and we have deployed about 230 satellites.”

A “Made in Space” 3D printer prints test samples while the printer is in the Microgravity Science Glovebox.

NASA PHOTO

Manber points to the growing market for deploying small cubesats from the ISS as “probably the biggest application for orbiting platforms.” And therein lies another story. “Actually NASA came to us and said we have the JEM Small Satellite Orbital Deployer [J-SSOD] under a barter arrangement with the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency [JAXA] and if you can find a customer to deploy CubeSats you can try using this. We went to everybody in the country and no one was interested. They said, ‘What, the space station? Crazy.’ And finally, I found a customer and believe it or not it was the University of Hanoi, … So, we deployed the University of Hanoi satellite, and as they say in the movies, the phone wouldn’t stop ringing because of the beautiful picture that they took. And people have since come onboard due to the several unique advantages of using the space station for satellite deployment. No. 1, we have ample up mass, ample rise up. No. 2, you are riding inside the vehicle in self storage, not on the outside. No. 3, you have the astronauts to help out. No. 4, until we came along, 100 percent of satellites were deployed on the day of launch. … We have a growing number of customers who launch CubeSats with us, and they get up there and they wait. The difficult part has ended. You are in space. You’ve launched and you can deploy when you wish.”

“One of the lessons of the commercialization of the ISS is that everybody in the 1980s thought, myself included, that if you get the space station up there, we’ll discover the cure for cancer. We have not yet done that. I do hope that a customer makes an extraordinary breakthrough in the microgravity environment of the ISS. But the lesson is that you cannot plan a market. It is a lesson that we know from socialism, that you cannot predict success. And it took a small commercial company to come in and say, ‘We won’t create the market, we will create the environment in a public-private partnership with NASA.’ … So far, the market is steering us in a different direction – of innovative ways to deploy satellites and in space manufacturing. The lesson is the same as in every American marketplace. Space is no different. And that is, a government agency cannot dictate what the market success will be. Congress cannot dictate. The market dictates.”

Flight engineer Mark Vande Hei swaps out a payload card from the TangoLab-1 facility and places it into the TangoLab-2 facility. TangoLab provides a standardized platform and open architecture for experimental modules called CubeLabs. CubeLab modules may be developed for use in 3D tissue and cell cultures.

NASA PHOTO

NASA’s Montalbano observed, “The CubeSat market has blown up. You have people deploying cubesats and now they are deploying these little postage [stamp] size satellites. ISS has played a significant role in allowing that market to take off.”

The market has led to new entrants into the ISS research enabling business, including a start-up company from Kentucky, Space Tango, which is filling new demand for spacebased research with its two Tango Labs containing 10 centimeter by 10 centimeter by 10 centimeter CubeLab modules that can run experiments either automatically or be manually controlled from the ground. “One of our big things is we do everything in-house,” said Twyman Clements, Space Tango’s CEO and co-founder. “We design, build, test, and operate really under one roof. We work with the end customer to find out what they really want, just like a psychologist. …No project is the ex- act same, but we know how to take from the experiences of flying 88 different experiments and quickly iterate and get designs down and get something to fly that works. …Since our first operational launch in February 2017, we have flown 53 different payloads and 88 different experiments. It really served us well encouraging a lot of different customers to fly and use microgravity and get their data down within two hours of it happening.”

Koichi Wakata, Expedition 38 flight engineer, in the Japanese Experiment Module (JEM) Pressurized Module (JPM). The JEM Small Satellite Orbital Deployer (J-SSOD) installed on the Multi-Purpose Experiment Platform (MPEP), is visible.

NASA PHOTO

Clements added, “The way the space station has been built, we see the backbone, the base infrastructure there for companies like us to integrate, to innovate and change things relatively quickly. We are going to be using the space station for the next couple of years for different kinds of research – materials, implantables [medical devices], transplantables, biomedical, semiconductors. I don’t think there’s going to be any one answer. I think there’s going to be many. You don’t need to be some tenured professor at a university or at NASA to use the ISS. It’s a national lab. There’s companies like ours that have built business cases on helping people use it. It’s a very accessible facility for all, the country, and for the organizations, the companies within it.”

THE ISS FACES THE FUTURE

The Trump administration’s proposal to end government funding for operating the ISS by 2025 has now put a focus on the facility’s future. Under new NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine, the agency is in discussion with several international companies to take over operations of the ISS and run it as a commercial laboratory. Meanwhile, work continues to upgrade the ISS’ commercial capabilities, including: an upgrade to the station’s solar arrays; a microgravity glove box to facilitate life science research; new, more compact exercise equipment for the astronauts onboard combining a treadmill, bicycle and resistive exercise device into one item – something that would clearly have potential for exploration; and concepts for developing the capability to refuel orbiting satellites. “We’re taking the time to understand the direction and understand the commercial need on how we’re going to make the changes we need to make, and what we are doing today is looking at what is required on station to operate late into the 2020s, regardless of who operates it,” said NASA’s Montalbano.

Whatever the outcome of the ISS’ management arrangements, its development over time as a hub for commercial research stands out as one of NASA’s signal accomplishments in its now 60 years of existence.