Bruce Pittman

Lynn Harper
ISS is an empty room in space. You get out of it what you put into it. One of the things we complained about is that we couldn't get enough things delivered to ISS, we couldn't store, and we couldn't get the samples back from ISS quick enough. The longer the sample is up there the worse it becomes. Then we started looking at how we could get samples back more rapidly. Joe and Bruce Pittman went to JSC to examine how samples could come back faster. Bruce started out at Ames working on Pioneer, he is the President of the Silicon Valley Space Club. Bruce will talk about how each piece could come together over the next five or ten years to make this become reality.

Bruce Pittman
Thanks. We will talk about the potential. We coined this phrase, "the greatest story never told." ISS is underutilized so we wanted to put together a business scenario. We spent a few months looking at this. This is a strawman for the remaining activity. There are fences to be mended because promises in the past were not kept, then we have to see how we can move forward.

Obviously the space station isn't a new idea. It goes back to science fiction authors from the 19th century. In the 20th century, Arthur C. Clarke's work "Islands in the Sky" was a huge influence on me. Warner Von Braun and Walt Disney worked on how a space station might look in the late 50s and early 60s. Arthur C. Clarke's, "2001 A Space Odyssey", directed by Stanley Kubrik was another huge influence. In 1972 we got Skylab our first space station. We almost lost it at the beginning when one of the solar panels got lost but JSC was able to rescue it. It was a 120 degrees when the first crew arrived there so they put up a sun shade. It came down in 1979 because we couldn't get the shuttle up quick enough to service it.

I came to this program in 1984. I went around the country trying to find people to use the space station. The space station we have today is not what we envisioned at the outset. We had to downscope some of our initial wants. In the 90s we had a lot of budget problems so we started a very collaborative relationship with the Russians and their Mir space station. We have worked together on ISS since its inception. The first crew was launched in 2000. We have about 15,000 cubic feet and it weighs about 400,000 lbs. The current crew size is 2 in space with support from about 100,000 people on earth. In 1984 the goal was only 12 people on the ground working on operations.

The vehicle is up there due to the hard work of a lot of people.

Over the years there have been a lot of raised expectations that have not been met. But biotech is different.

It's different because all of the stars are in alignment. The business case -- we're talking about learning in space and bringing the knowledge back to the ground to produce on earth. The other part is the infrastructure that exist. The Russians could do this today. But that solution might not be attractive to the public and the American congress. So what's the American solution?

The key thing is throughput. Biotech runs on short learning cycles. The value of your service is proportional to how quick you can do this. If you can do this quickly it's worth much more.

We decided that monthly up-mass makes a lot of sense, that's a good near term target. 12 mid-deck lockers or about 24 cubic feet of mass and a couple thousand kilos has to go up. 1-2 kg and 3-4 liters should be brought back down. We're proposing that Ames could be the friendly front-door.

What are some of the infrastructure requirements? We have to be able to get new experiments developed. And we have to be able to get it into space. We need to send live cargo. You have to be able to accommodate the whole cycle, you need late access. There are rules and regulations to docking to the station. You have to get it in and store it, then you need a place to do the experiment. And you need time and the proper crew. You want all that to be as customer-centric as possible.

Getting the stuff up there is a challenge. The visiting vehicle requirement has to be met. We might have to revisit this issue to see if it can be simplified.

There are new players in the game and the thing is to lead, follow, or get run over. China is an emerging player. There are many entrepreneurs getting involved. There are a lot of people bringing their own money, like Jeff Bezos and Paul Allen. Bob Bigelow wants to put up inflatable space facilities.

There's stuff on board right now that is being underutilized, things like CGBA. There are other things that are up there or ready to go up that will help out a lot.

The speed is the key issue to getting samples back down to earth. From door-to-door (ISS back down to earth) could be no more than four hours. The nice thing is that six of these samples could fit in a mid-deck locker. That holds 61 biological samples in what we currently use. You could get more if we reconfigured it.

There are a lot of candidates here. The job over the next day and a half is to see if this is real. Clearly, one of the issues is what is this going to cost? We don't have a good handle on that right now but we know it has to get cheaper, more reliable, and easier.

Questions for Moving Forward
There are questions to address to move forward: How can we provide the needed services? When would these services be available? How much would this cost? Who are the customers? What are appropriate Government and private roles? What is the proper business model? Legislative and policy enabler and impediments? Who should be involved in further development?

Questions

The commercial project plan is in draft form right now. We think there's synergy between the plan and the biotech industry proposal.

Industry wants standardized things. Can we give that to them?

We can and we must. We have to keep it simple. I also want to mention that there needs to be an outreach program. Part of that has to do with the fence mending.

What are the appropriate Government and private roles?

Tax payers expect a return in the form of positive benefits from their taxes. I suspect a bifurcated model of government research and the private sector. The question we need to resolve is doing this without the history of competition between the government and the entrepreneurs.

There's been other models developed. We may need to come up with something new. In 1958 NASA was given the authority to do what no other government agency has. DARPA does much more to make use of the NASA enabling legislation than NASA does. Is NASA utilizing its capabilities to the fullest?

You don't seem to be emphasizing on-orbit analysis much. Why?

That's great. But due to the challenge of crew time the easiest thing to do is to bring the samples back to earth. In addition that's where the best labs are. The next question is, if you're doing the analysis in space who would be doing the analysis? That's another reason to do the analysis on the ground.

But isn't ISS the problem because it seems to eat up all the money?

That's clearly an issue. But the majority of the budget for man space flight isn't for ISS, it's for the shuttle, and the shuttle is going away. We will have to look at new strategies to bring the cost down while adding more value.

There's a vacancy that the commercial sector can fill now and that is the NIH-like side of NASA seems to be decreasing.

Langdon
Thank you to all the presenters this morning. And thank you for being good participants. Now I'm going to give you your first assignment. We're not expecting you to reach consensus on the work. We want you to accentuate the differences. Differences of opinion reflect differences of assumptions and that can help us make better decisions.