Space Access ’11: NanoRacks

Rich Pounelle
NanoRacks

• adopted a CubeSat approach to experiment racks — plug-and-play microgravity experiments
• basic cost of $25,000 for 30 days on the International Space Station for education, $50,000 for commercial
• payload is placed in a small camera bag — easy to get packed into a Progress or Soyuz — always room for one more small thing
• Plenty of capacity on the ISS — getting a full payload rack up to the station is very expensive — shrink them down to a smaller size
• NanoRacks acts as the main point of contact for the customer — don’t have to deal directly with NASA
• More than 50 payloads in the pipeline
• Price is low enough that schools can put experiments into orbit
• Difficult to get payloads to the ground, but easy to get the data back — high data speeds
• Working on an external rack on the station
• Working with Masten and other groups to be single point of contact between experimenters and providers — the same type of work they do with NASA
• Great example of how if you keep pushing on something, you can be successful and how commercial groups can help NASA to leverage its assets
• As community develops, wants to develop common standards for data and payloads — open source
• Three international customers — experiments fall into a gray area in terms of ITAR restrictions