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.

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.”

“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.”

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.”