“One of the lessons of the commercialization of the ISS is that everybody in the 1980s thought, myself included, that if you get the space station up there, we’ll discover the cure for cancer. We have not yet done that. I do hope that a customer makes an extraordinary breakthrough in the microgravity environment of the ISS. But the lesson is that you cannot plan a market. It is a lesson that we know from socialism, that you cannot predict success. And it took a small commercial company to come in and say, ‘We won’t create the market, we will create the environment in a public-private partnership with NASA.’ … So far, the market is steering us in a different direction – of innovative ways to deploy satellites and in space manufacturing. The lesson is the same as in every American marketplace. Space is no different. And that is, a government agency cannot dictate what the market success will be. Congress cannot dictate. The market dictates.”
NASA’s Montalbano observed, “The CubeSat market has blown up. You have people deploying cubesats and now they are deploying these little postage [stamp] size satellites. ISS has played a significant role in allowing that market to take off.”
Flight engineer Mark Vande Hei swaps out a payload card from the TangoLab-1 facility and places it into the TangoLab-2 facility. TangoLab provides a standardized platform and open architecture for experimental modules called CubeLabs. CubeLab modules may be developed for use in 3D tissue and cell cultures. NASA photo
The market has led to new entrants into the ISS research enabling business, including a start-up company from Kentucky, Space Tango, which is filling new demand for space-based research with its two Tango Labs containing 10 centimeter by 10 centimeter by 10 centimeter CubeLab modules that can run experiments either automatically or be manually controlled from the ground. “One of our big things is we do everything in-house,” said Twyman Clements, Space Tango’s CEO and co-founder. “We design, build, test, and operate really under one roof. We work with the end customer to find out what they really want, just like a psychologist. …No project is the exact same, but we know how to take from the experiences of flying 88 different experiments and quickly iterate and get designs down and get something to fly that works. …Since our first operational launch in February 2017, we have flown 53 different payloads and 88 different experiments. It really served us well encouraging a lot of different customers to fly and use microgravity and get their data down within two hours of it happening.”
Clements added, “The way the space station has been built, we see the backbone, the base infrastructure there for companies like us to integrate, to innovate and change things relatively quickly. We are going to be using the space station for the next couple of years for different kinds of research – materials, implantables [medical devices], transplantables, biomedical, semiconductors. I don’t think there’s going to be any one answer. I think there’s going to be many. You don’t need to be some tenured professor at a university or at NASA to use the ISS. It’s a national lab. There’s companies like ours that have built business cases on helping people use it. It’s a very accessible facility for all, the country, and for the organizations, the companies within it.”
The ISS Faces the Future
The Trump administration’s proposal to end government funding for operating the ISS by 2025 has now put a focus on the facility’s future. Under new NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine, the agency is in discussion with several international companies to take over operations of the ISS and run it as a commercial laboratory. Meanwhile, work continues to upgrade the ISS’ commercial capabilities, including: an upgrade to the station’s solar arrays; a microgravity glove box to facilitate life science research; new, more compact exercise equipment for the astronauts onboard combining a treadmill, bicycle and resistive exercise device into one item – something that would clearly have potential for exploration; and concepts for developing the capability to refuel orbiting satellites. “We’re taking the time to understand the direction and understand the commercial need on how we’re going to make the changes we need to make, and what we are doing today is looking at what is required on station to operate late into the 2020s, regardless of who operates it,” said NASA’s Montalbano.
NASA astronaut Andrew Feustel is seen in the Cupola, holding sample bags of crystals grown under experimental conditions controlled by middle and high school students as part of the CASIS PCG-9 investigation. NASA photo
Whatever the outcome of the ISS’ management arrangements, its development over time as a hub for commercial research stands out as one of NASA’s signal accomplishments in its now 60 years of existence.