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 on-line 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.”

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 to new startups.

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.”