Commercial Research Opportunites Open Up on International Space Station

International Space Station

ISS Program Reaches Out
Aviation Week

Nearly 300 participants gathered Aug. 3 for the first NASA International Space Station Research Academy, a three-day offering designed to familiarize researchers and payload developers with the orbiting outpost’s designation as a National Laboratory and its capabilities to support experiments in fields ranging from fundamental biology and physics to biotechnology and Earth observations.

The initial program, conducted close to the Johnson Space Center in Houston, is likely to be repeated around the country as NASA nears the end of the station’s 12-year assembly, with ample room to spare on the station for scientists who would not normally be interested in microgravity investigations.

“It’s a beautiful assembly in and of itself,” Rod Jones, NASA’s space station payload operations manager, told the academy. “But it’s not really useful if we are not doing research on it. Our job is to rack and stack and fill up the mission.”

NASA controls 75% of the internal station volume, which is shared with its foreign partners and rivals the size of a four-bedroom house. Currently, however, NASA intends to use just half of its internal and external assets for its own research, leaving the rest to users eligible under National Lab guidelines established by Congress in 2005.

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