Moving Ahead With the ISS National Lab

Who would have thought that the PC game I designed in collaboration with NASA through a space act agreement beginning in 2002, would have been so far ahead of the curve.

http://www.spacestationsim.com

Bill

Does 'access to the ISS' include paying for launch and integration costs? That is going to be show stopper for many potential experimenters.
Does anyone know?

BrianM | April 26, 2010 2:03 PM | Reply

The real issues with flying experiments on the ISS, which need to be fixed before ISS will be succesful:

"I participated in a few things flying up there and you pointed out all the non-sense in starting every time from scratch, re-inventing the wheel each time, not re-using existing stuff and so on."

The following is very important, critical to the success of ISS; unfortunately the ISS program management thinks they are already succesful since ISS is now assembled. So far you are on the receiving end of criticism since it took a quarter century and cost so much money. But assembly complete was only the starting point. Now its time to see if anyone can do anything with ISS. SO here are the keys; with them you might prove successful; without them you've already failed:

ISS needs to develop streamlined integration processes and hardware for interfacing its systems to payloads that use common earth-laboratory connections.

Things that make the ISS difficult to use for science (or for anything else).

-THE ASTRONAUTS - few - select the ones who can fly as researchers/scientists. Or if you have complex equipment flying, select an engineer who can operate and maintain the equipment. Most of the people on board ought to be doing serious scientific study and not working as technicians to simply maintain the ISS.

If you want a 'manned space laboratory' then send people in a capacity where they can be used to do some serious work.

The US segment looks pristine and beautiful, as though there is little serious work that has gone on in there. Right now the possibility of contamination is not permitted. You need to open the US segment up to hands on experimentation and the crew needs to be trained, dressed, and equipped to do real hands on work.

- interfaces on-board for power, fluids, data and digital control need to either be provided to the experimenter or needs to be standardized to more typical ground based lab designs. Right now every minor little piece of equipment has to be built specially to be able to plug in on ISS. You need to change this.

- interfaces, integration processes and schedule on the ground and between the ground and space needs to be seriously expedited. If you cannot fly the basic inside payload in a year, then you are using too much of the taxpayers money and the experimenter's time and resources. The data you collect needs to be digitized so that the experimenters never need to be asked the same question more than once.

- you better get some down mass capability beginning in a few months, lack of ANY down mass will preclude almost any kind of ground-based experiments and sample analysis. Until you have a US capability available, maybe you'd better start buying some extra Soyuz vehicles that can be returned unmanned with samples and return hardware.

The other thing you'd better start doing is reporting on the activities and the value of the activities astronauts are conducting on-board. Honestly, even if they are doing useful stuff up there, if no one knows about it, what they are doing does not really matter. Once Shuttle shuts down, ISS is the visible face of HSF and hopefully its not going to be flaming through the sky anytime soon, so you'd better up the gain on your PR. HSF is about to become invisible.

Good point Earthshine--but the REAL showstopper (and why ISS extension to 2020 is a farce) is that after Shuttle is retired, the vaunted "access to ISS" is only for small experiments and payloads--AND, there is virtually NO down payload capability--yeah, I know---ATV and HTV are looking at down capability --good luck! So, no more AMS sized payloads, like big cryo tech demos or solar panel replacements (maybe single cells! great!)--in other words after next year the cost-effectiveness of ISS will drop to an all-time low (maybe as low as Congress and Obama's ratings!) What a waste!
Keep the Shuttle flying--two a year for four more years--it ain't that hard OR that "expensive" compared to the throwing away of $$B's on "Technology R&E" with NO MISSION OBJECTIVES!
Pitiful!

Always the negative. Have a read of this and cheer up a little.

http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/20090029998_2009030907.pdf
"International Space Station Science Research Accomplishments During the Assembly Years: An Analysis of Results from 2000-2008"
262 pages!
One can only guess at what some of the commercially sensitive results are?

Most experiments need very little downmass, the ISS is not a manufacturing facility. Instead what is needed is regular and affordable ACCESS.

BrianM April 26, 2010 10:39 PM
"Right now the possibility of contamination is not permitted."
It will never be permitted. Contamination in such a a closed system could shut the entire facility down. Anyway an experiment that produces contamination is a poorly designed experiment and will never be flown on the ISS. Hazardous experiments can be flown on suborbital demonstrators or an much reused Dragonlab. And as for the suggestion that the ISS rack system be revised to fit your concept of "more typical ground based lab designs. " Bunsen burners? Guinea Pig cages? I would suggest that most ground based lab designs will need gravity to make them work in zero gee thus defeating the purpose of the experiment. The ISS rack system is what the international community decided upon. Wiser heads...

I heartily endorse the concept of extending the Shuttle to provide greater downmass. Unfortunately it doesn't seem likely to happen.

ISS Payloads already have a streamlined process that is shorter then that used for other components of the station. All interfaces for any payload are well defined and readily available to any one designing an experirement. Data collected can be digitzed and downlinked to the ground if desired by the PI as well as the downlink of video. ISS is in the process of upgrading the Ku-Band system to substantially increase the data bandwidth for payloads. Last I have often seen PIs directly patched into the voice loops so they can interact directly with the crew while running the payload while watching them on the video downlink.

Seems like ISS is

I think we were sent to the same paper the other day under this thread:

http://nasawatch.com/archives/2010/04/story-musgrave.html#comments

But the readers were unconvinced.

We know the ISS has great potential; people have dreamed of having this capability for a century. Now we have to show it can be used, with an emphasis on showing off the work and progress. So far it appears that most of the focus is on the Shuttle missions going to and from, and not on what is happening in orbit.

As far as contamination, recent visitors to the ISS have said, 'its like the Russian segment is the boiler-room, everything important for living and working goes on in there; its tighter quarters, a bit dark; in contrast the US side looks great, larger, brighter, pristine, but so much of the work is going on in the other end.'

Racks provide a standard package that made them easy to carry logistically via Shuttle/MPLM, trade places from one module to another, and allows them to get away from the pressure wall in case we get hit and punctured. ISPRs were not defined for purposes of the experiment community. For that you need the inserts that go into the racks that make them look like a middeck or Spacehab. A lot of those features were important as long as Shuttles were flying. Now you need to expand commonality to power and other types of connections and services.

I'm going to momentarily set aside my pro-CxP hat and try some constructive criticism:

I hope to be proven wrong, but I've serious doubts we'll see too many real bids (as in fully paying for launch/retrieve costs, + a reasonable overhead and even ...*gasp*... profit). This might have worked on a follow-on Shuttle which, usually, has cargo bay volume (and payload mass) to spare, but purchasing limited mass/volume in a Soyuz, ATV, Dragon, Cygnus, etc., is a different story. The other issue is whether sensitive microgravity experiments would be better off in a smaller human-tended 'free flier' (like Genesis II) instead of an ISS with people bumping all over the inside and attitude control jets jerking the station.

Personally, I think relying only on Earth Sciences to justify ISS is a redherring. It doesn't mean we shouldn't do any, of course, but betting on paying customers to eventually pony up most of the funds to sustain ISS is risky. For ISS to really work well past 2020 I believe we need to start thinking of some kind of 'docking truss' which, by the way, is possible thanks to the 'Mars mafia' that snuck attachment points into the T1 truss for future expansions. Maybe, perhaps, this 'docking' truss could even have a fuel depot where water is separated into hydrogen/oxygen using solar power.

Also, I'd like to see some real proposals for a demonstration solar colector / power plant in space. Until we have a breakthrough in Fusion Energy (which could never happen) that's the only practical solution I see to our energy (and space funding) problems.

Ok, time to put my CxP hat back on (sorry, to me it's really Ares-5 what makes a difference ... without it I don't believe we stand a chance even in LEO).

One of the biggest problems to solve will be getting MOD and the crew invested in maximizing time available and actually spent on payload and science tasks. Almost everyone at JSC will quickly become bored with ISS after the last Shuttle visit, and they will look for something more exciting to do with ground controller and crew time than science tasks and tending payloads for non-JSC customers month after month.

I looked over the 262 page report of ISS research, but nothing jumped out at me as highly important. I think it would be more useful to see the, say, top 5 scientific accomplishments of the ISS. Anyone have that information?

I have to say that I'm skeptical that the ISS's research results could be worth the cost. $100 billion? For that much money, you could pay for the Mars Rovers, the Human Genome Project, the Large Hadron Collider, and the Hubble Telescope, and still have about $80 billion dollars left over!

I suspect most of the research are things developed on Shuttle and done repeatedly there, and now carried over to ISS. Disappointing that there is so little new research being conducted by organizations outside NASA, at their expense and not NASA's.

ex-Navy:
"ISS Payloads already have a streamlined process that is shorter then that used for other components of the station. All interfaces for any payload are well defined and readily available to any one designing an experiment."

-sounds like an inside ISS, engineer's perspective.

Compared to most new ISS hardware, its not too hard to beat a 3 or 4 year integration cycle if you have dollars. In fact you have to wonder, for an organization/program set up to do this kind of work, and with such well defined systems and interfaces, as you've indicated, why does it take 3 or 4 years ? No wonder the program has taken a quarter century and been so expensive.

And just because the systems and resources are defined, does not mean it is cost effective or easy to build a set of hardware that can be used only uniquely on ISS; especially when we are frequently talking about a small research group with no engineering arm.

Perhaps ISS needs a group to look at it from the prospective customer's perspective. Does ISS even know who their prospective customers are?

We already try to maximize time for science. Ground does all of the vehicle systems management and configuration to free up the crew to maximize time devoted to payloads. Crew only does systems activities that can't be done from the ground. They are also hard requirements for crew time for payload activities that must be met as part of the planning of the crew schedule.

I have a Space Act agreement to allow a technology transfer from NASA regarding scientific experiments performed aboard ISS for the purpose of creating a commercial simulation depicting the challenges of doing micro gravity science in space to promote STEM learning. I eventually gave up on the science because according to my Huntsville contact, most of the data belongs not to NASA but to the sponsoring university or corporation. If said sponsor is not paying for their efforts then someone is paying (taxpayer) without gaining a benefit.

Bill

As I said: "One can only guess at what some of the commercially sensitive results are?"
The science has only just started. However, as a Biochemist, this little gem may save millions of lives in the not too distant future:
"By understanding the changes that microorganisms undergo in the space environment, these studies may lead to the development of vaccines and other novel countermeasures for the treatment and prevention of infectious diseases occurring during space flight and on Earth." p 97 ibid.

If you are interested in "automotive and transportation applications, allowing manufacturers to reduce vehicle weight, increase the strength of components and improve emission controls. Then this applies.

This is half the problem. The: "I want want it now!" fast food generation! How many attempts did Edison make before the lightbulb came on in his head?

Of cource the biggest engineering dividend is the ISS itself and the skill set gained in it's construction and now: maintenance.

Overall the political dividend may be of greatest benefit to Humankind. In the final analysis the ISS' 'worth' will be demonstrated if the Solar System is utilised "... in peace for ALL Mankind."

brobof, thank you for highlighting a couple research results. It's interesting that you mention the microorganism virulence study, though. It took place on the Space Shuttle, not the ISS, and it required significant downmass, so it's hardly evidence in favor of the ISS as a scientific platform.

I enjoyed reading the microorganism paper, but I don't think it's any more likely to save millions of lives than the hundreds of other (much less costly) papers on Hfq's role in the virulence in Salmonella.