Forum Summary: Commercial Opportunities in Space (October 5 - 7, 2005)

I want to give you a sense of what we're going over the next couple of days. We call this kind of workshop Collaborative Design. Could you share with me some of your experiences with this kind of idea?

• I was surprised when I walked in and knew that today was going to be different than yesterday.
• Collaboration has to be based on clear mutual benefit.

Let's focus on the mutuality part. How can we assure that what we're doing is mutually beneficial?

• Bringing diverse ideas to the table. The more diverse the group is, the more ideas we'll get.
• We're doing well collaborating within our own organizations, but not with our customers. It would be nice if the next workshop included some of our customers.

LM: When you think of design with complex elements, what do you have to keep in mind?

• Designs need to be reality-based. It's easy to be over-idealistic or over-pessimistic.
• It's harder to design things perfectly the first time. It's better to design something, then test it and iterate it several times. We want to cut the cycle time of the iteration.
• One of the elements of our collaborative design is to use a concept in industrial design called rapid prototyping.
• Suspension of judgment is good and keeps us open to the various possibilities out there. Our BS-meters are set a little too high and I suggest we tone it down a bit so we can be open to more ideas.

LM: Disagreements are very valuable in the creative process and we need to be able to bring all of our points of view to the table.

• We need to identify who all of the stakeholders are.
• We should avoid going to solutions too fast.

LM: Yes, we have the opportunity to put out ideas and test them before thinking or expecting to have the answer right away.

• We need to break it down so that we know we're talking about the same things.

LM: When you talk about complex systems, it takes a while to get down to the core elements. We'll get to them over the next couple of days as we dig deeper. Phil spoke about the end goal of this workshop and I think it would be valuable to restate that. We're involved in creating multiple new industries. We need to figure out how we can stimulate and accelerate their growth.

• We also want to articulate the strategies that get us from where we are today to where we can become self-sustaining.

LM: Yes, you just elucidated one of the assumptions we have in this. Flight frequency is an enabler of whatever industry we are trying to create.

• One of the striking things of yesterday was the enthusiasm. Collaboration at this early stage is a good idea. There is money to be made in this.
• If I go to the moon and I'm mining ice, and if your company wants to come and mine ice too, then we need to come up with the ways we make decisions, and work together.

LM: At InnovationLabs we have found that we get excellent ideas from people when they're posed with questions. So we've come up with some exercises for you to stimulate collaboration. But don't just check the boxes and answer the questions. See if they are the right questions. I can let you know right now that you will not have enough time to do the exercises. You will want to get through these as far as you can get. Time is an interesting constraint to the creative process, so we will create the conditions for you to do just that.

• This is an open-ended process and we don't know exactly where we'll end up tomorrow afternoon. We have an unpredictable output. We will create it together.

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All teams received the same assignment which is indicated below.

The overall key points for protein crystal growth and biotech need to be shown. At least one example needs to be made and we'd like to have it coming out of this workshop.

The biggest surprise was the case for the crystal growth. It was so compelling and it appears able to be done in the near-term.

Focus on the customers and not on the flight. We talk about the amount it costs to make a launch but that's not feasible for any one enterprise, so we need to think about smaller amounts that anyone might be able to afford to use the flight. Fed Ex doesn't...

The most important take-home message is that someone needs to pull together all the pieces. The dollars, the government, the marketing. Investors are looking towards NASA for the approval of their business plans.

America needs to invest in both the supply and the demand. We also want to ask what role government should have. The government doesn't need to get out of the way, but engage appropriately. We don't completely know totally what that will look like.

The role of ACES should play the key role of pulling the pieces together and be ruthlessly realistic in the market that needs to be developed. What are the standards for each of the industries? The biotech industry will have different needs than other customers. We need to understand what those are.

We need to provide a spokesperson for the agency. We cannot sabotage each other any more. We need to have a fair broker. We need to provide recommendations to the government.

People were very enthusiastic about yesterday. We are very excited by how many launch vehicles are coming into being. Supply seems to be ahead of demand. There seems to be a variety of opportunities in space tourism. The space life sciences are inspiring. We looked at our government working policy and thought about using space as a way of working with other governments.

It was eye-opening that we might have to prove a $1B market for the industry. We need a home run in biotech.

What was most important was low cost access to space. Government funding is still required. ACES can bring together all sectors.

The one thing we thought we omitted was the policy discussion. We want to know more about the environmental impacts. Where do go from here in this area?

How can science and engineers educate their elected officials? When going from an environment like this to actively participating with local officials, we need a mind set change. It calls for overt action on all our parts.

We need representatives from the commercial science industry. We need to think about how to involve youth in this.

We disagree with the idea that "If you build it they will come." We want to know the plan for educating the biotech industry. The goal for ACES is to create a structure for the consolidation of the various components.

We see a good role for ACES to be the negotiator for the industry. We need to figure out how to do that. One thing on which we have some agreement and disagreement is the role of NASA. This helps highlight different assumptions.

Several options included: trying to find some NASA-commercial partnership, go back to its original charter, focus on basic research. The idea that only the government can fund basic research should be called into question. Maybe other creative ways could come into play here.

We're early enough in the game right now that there isn't a huge amount of business going on, so this is the best time to collaborate before all the cut-throat commercial competition gets involved.

One of the important things that is missing here in terms of creativity is that many of these things are intangible. We should not only go after the money but also understand that there are things that are unexpected in space. Large companies are successful, but end up going through a lot of changes. Money is not always the solution, and sometimes gets in the way of future successes.

The idea of an effort to design a system would be worthwhile. NASA's past successes and the path they blaze may help businesses later on even if all their resources are intimidating to them.

When I tell my big companies that I'm going to go spend time with NASA, they think I'm a space cadet. We need to get the message of what we're doing into the mainstream.

Our culture focuses on crises. There isn't much attention or desire to see good things on television. Most people do not run to the waiting room saying "the patient is healthy!" Also, we need to get into the mainstream the idea that life sciences is a big part of research in space. I think we need some good PR on both of the areas.

The compelling reasons to do biotech is clear. The demand exceeds the supply but the price point is still too high. Right now it seems that the demand and supply are disconnected. We need to get regular, reliable, and affordable access to space.

We also need to see the interdependencies between the groups that have the need. The Capital panel seemed to indicate that there are no near-term lower risk opportunities. It seemed that the VCs are not interested in funding until we have better things to show. I think Paul Allen is a great example. All the panel said yesterday is that Paul invested $30M to make $10M. But they failed to mention that he got a contract for $100M. We need to find people who are willing to take the risk of investing into this now without needing proof that it will work. Maybe we should find some aging billionaires. There is a lot of sizzle in what is possible in that area.

Facilitation doesn't mean powerpoint charts but we need to create places to really collaborate and do this. We need good facilitation techniques within our organizations

It was interesting to see the situation with billionaires who are interested in the tourism, and then you have the biotech folks who are interested in the research.

Like Dr. Blumberg said, who knows what you'll discover when you go down the path of the unknown, but we need to go down that path to find out.

As long as the launch costs remain where they are, we will have challenges. We also need to have reliable access. We can't have situations where you don't know when the launch is going to happen. This is also key for our investors.

There are two proactive words in NASA's charter to develop the commercialization of space. On the capital side we notice that the funding is available but they need to know it's real. When the X-Prize was out there you could see at the FAA site that a lot of these propositions are available but they never come to fruition. We need to have people who can get us to the proof of concept.

There exists a huge potential in this. One of the things we're not sure of yet is whether NASA is on board with commercialization. When we've come from SpaceHab and talked to people at NASA they say they are interested. But where SpaceHab is able to put that into play, we have a struggle.

ACES needs to put together the market plan and be the synthesizer for this venture. They need resources to do that at the level where it counts.

I want to acknowledge our whole team. We had a good mix of constituents in our group.

The first thing we noted is that physiological and psychological dependence on gravity is a very important component.

Government has done a great job with pent-up demand. We need to find a way to get around them and figure out how to take advantage of the desire.

There were some early opportunities by John Deere and 3M but they died. Why is that? And how do we make sure we don't end up in the same place? Or like Iridium?

We wondered if the space tourism market is really real, and what the right policy might be for government, for ACES, and for the rest of the industry.

ACES should continue to facilitate collaboration, bringing all the stakeholders together. They should also bring this to Congress.

It is better to develop small payloads early on. It's better to have NASA buy a block of suborbital flights and parcel them out at a nominal fee. This way NASA can stay out of the start up and make it more nimble.

There might be a block of flight capability which can do some of the research. The pitch I had been pushing is one that scales with size. There is someone developing a 1M pound thrust launcher. I believe we need to start really small.

We had an interesting team. What we learned yesterday is that we had some business cases where the investors are hesitant because there is no certainty in the return.

We looked at the throughput and money that is essential for commercial development. We needed not only frequency but also predictability. There also needs to be consistency with policy. It would be nice if the government was proactive with the encouragement of development.

We disagreed with the statement that sizzle wasn't important. For the VC who is looking to build a retirement fund, that makes sense. But we do believe there is sizzle in these ideas and that will make a difference.

Let's quit comparing what the government is trying to do with what commercial space wants to do. We're echoing a lot of what was said already. We want to make a clearing house as a networking group for the supply and demand as well as lessons learned.

Let's propose a proof of concept and implement it.

Q: Are you suggesting that ACES becomes like FedEx?

No. We don't know exactly how this would work.

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Dan Rasky

I am happy to introduce Brant. he has been working very diligently on commercial NASA space opportunities. I know he likes to get large prizes on the table. He's talking to you today as the program director of the systems Mission Directorate.

I help with formulating a number of different programs and working with the commercial sector. I want to throw out a couple of slides that we've been discussing here at NASA headquarters.

We want to talk to you today about this to see what reaction we get. From that we will go forward with this.

I want to discuss a couple of near-term opportunities. It assumes that NASA provides the initial launches and some of the data for the micro-gravity. The commercial providers will provide everything else. We hope that these will be executable in 2 to 3 years.

The two pathfinders we're looking at have come out of the X-Prize. NASA has purchased from DARPA a launch of the small launch vehicle that will be selected from their Falcon program.

We're just testing the waters today and depending on what you folks say, we will talk to DARPA. It is still possible we'll find showstoppers, but we're hoping not.

We'd like to get your feedback so we know how to go forward today. Once we get that we will create a formal request.

There are a couple of new suborbital launch vehicles that are typically reusable rockets. With this kind of trajectory, you can have about 3-5 minutes of microgravity instead of the typical 30 seconds. It tends to be a more low cost launch. Virgin is still announcing about $10k per launch. You can envision research campaigns that will use the 3-5 minutes of microgravity.

We don't know if it's millinewtons or micronewtons.

We've sketched out an RFI to get more information so that we can make our formal RFP. We hope we can find some supporters so that we can measure the microgravity environment. Once we define this, the contract would have options for additional launches. We could possibly provide some of these launches to commercial partners.

We would use the options from the RFP to buy up other launches. It might be from $20k to a couple $100k. The IP from the launches would remain with the commercial providers.

Here are some of the key issues I'd like you to consider. Is it worth pursuing? Is the microgravity duration worth it to anyone in the commercial realm? We also want to figure out the selection criteria as well as what the market is that we should pursue here.

The other opportunity is on DARPA's Falcon program. This launch will make available 2 commercial payloads. The launch would be available around 2008 and is valued at about $5-10M. Besides these agreements, NASA would pay for the launch and the commercial payload providers would pay for the rest.

This opportunity has the same key issues as the first one.

Question & Answer

Question: What is the estimated time of orbit for the Falcon flight? That will become a key enabler or disabler for commercial purposes.

BS: I don't know at this time. It would depend on what would be set up. It's about 2,000 pounds and it will depend how much is allocated for relaunch.

Q: What's the time frame for when the decision of which actual launch vehicle will be chosen?

BS: They all have a different approach so we're not sure. We'd have to work with DARPA to figure out the timeframe so we would know who the provider is.

Q: Going back to the suborbital opportunity, what timeframe and payload size?

BS: We could go out with an RFI later this fall, so the formal solicitation would be late this year, or early next year. Payload size would have some follow-on options and they are TBD. It depends upon the interest we have.

Q: Are these payloads autonomous or would there be access and telemetry?

BS: We would want to specify whether we launch an operator or if we'd go totally autonomous. We would include that in the RFI.

Q: What is your time frame for receiving comments?

BS: It depends on the reaction we get from the workshop here. We would expect to have the RFI in place by late October.

Q: Fairly recently, ESMD has required that all the RPCs tailor their research objectives to the president's and NASA's vision. Would you require that any payload for this opportunity have science objectives that support exploration goals?

BS: I don't see that as something that would be required. When you're talking about commercial biotech research there may not be a lot of synergy with exploration goals.

Q: Do you see ESMD having long-term advocacy?

BS: The commercial sector is more intimately involved in what we do as we extend the frontier. We will try to devote some attention to that.

Q: Would you be willing to open up part of these opportunities to education and student-involved projects?

BS: That could be part of a commercial payload provider's options. Part of the effort needs to be devoted to education, so it's a possibility. I see that happening more on the NASA side. It might be professional or student researchers at universities or even at high schools.

Q: Would you consider other government agencies as an option?

BS: There might be some legal obstacles, but that probably would be a possibility.

Dan: Thank you very much, Brant, for providing this and telling us about these opportunities.

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I heard a lot about needing a forum for the emerging space companies and other investors.

The workshop results are going to be hand-carried back to NASA headquarters as well as certain others. People ask what is ACES and I say, look around the room. We are ACES and right now we're facilitating the dialogue to figure out what needs to happen next. We don't know what it's going to look like in 5 years. It's evolving.

Q: We're going to the senate and raise the importance of the life sciences community as a whole. We want to look to the future with ACES and are hoping with your permission that in the future we could talk about ACES activity in terms of what it looks like going forward.

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Langdon Morris: The purposes of doing this kind of scenario work is to show people who tricky it is to predict the future. If you try to predict from a world you don't recognize you may miss some important elements. So this exercise is to prepare us for an unknown future. Having multiple teams look at multiple strategies we'll have a great opportunities to understand many worlds.

Our key variables are two-way traffic, launch, and return. We focused on price rather than cost. Sooner or later there will be a stowaway to space. We ended up with a price as one axis, and market uncertainty being another axis. This gives us a range of price from free to very expensive. We looked at the extremes, and at the place where there is no market is death. Health issues and war might be concerns.

In another quadrant we have commodity. We would spend a few years in high market/high price where maybe there is a new religion that says we have to colonize Mars.

Research and science in the death quadrant is where we are now. Even though the cost comes down, there are no players. Applied biotech is sustainable in the 3rd and 4th quadrants.

We looked at tourism, money, capital, and finance. We indicated which quadrant that they thrive and die in.

We identified two uncertain but highly influential factors: private or commercialization commitment, and government commitment. We looked at a new space race - maybe competition between India and China. There would be no viable business cases. This is the closest to where we are today.

If we have no money and no business cases as well as no government funding, this is equal to the great depression.

Here we have the extension of life quadrant. If you could cure cancer by producing it in space then we could get everyone on board. The fourth quadrant is the commercialized market called the Lunar Theme Park.

In the space systems, both levels of commitment show higher space frequency. The government would have their own interests in tourism and of course the commercial interest would be there.

We had to identify a project that would succeed or fail. Some of this has to do with the management of the FAA. It started as a $2B project for IBM.

in order to be successful we need a profitable venture. We need to expand the technology and the commitment. We need a strong champion. Without that, it's difficult to have a successful project.

We need to sustain marketing and have a follow-up market. We have three reasons we would make it better. We need to fight scope creep and have good systems engineering.

We considered whether scale was appropriate. We made a list of companies that fit either on the bad or the good side. We talked about the different qualities which made each of the organizations fill one side or the other. Some of these make excellent case studies.

We picked a good and bad example. We looked at SpaceHab, which used venture financing but not angel investors. Even in the downturns the partner wanted to keep the door open. Prices were set that were acceptable to the market.

We had a diversity of core competencies so that if any one side of business went bad there were other sides that were able to pull up the balance. The contractor doesn't own the prime assets, the government does. They also had firm fixed price contracts.

On the other side, we looked at Rotary. They never considered abandoning SDSL. They never transcended their angel investing and found other financing. They weren't the only ones who made a mistake here. Motorola spent billions of dollars in this area. This was the biggest financial mistake in the world.

One of the benefits from SpaceX is that there is no government in their launcher.

Team 9

We also had a scenario exercise. Let's start with the worst case scenario which we called the Status Quo. The drivers that cause this scenario are a prohibitive regulatory environment. There are highly visible financial failures.

You could have a lack of investors because the factors don't make it attractive enough. You have very easy access to space but unfriendly business environments. This quadrant we called it "we built it but they didn't come."

This one is called "life is beautiful" where we have a smart regulatory environment. All the businesses involved are customer-centric. Customers are not required to accept cookie cutter solutions. Small fortunes turn into big fortunes.

Looking at different categories of businesses that would be involved in this, we saw that research science could develop a foundation and create the market for space, but it doesn't drive it. The applied biotech can do this but they need a successful track record.

We didn't know much about resources. We figure it's a demand topic that appears later. This needs extensive proof of concept work. On the supply side of the whole deal is to develop and manage resources. We need to make sure it's financially viable.

Q: If there is a great increase in the launch rate, what about debris and collision? If these ambitious markets work out, that has to be taken into consideration.

There is 4 million pounds in LEO and it's about 99% free right now.

We considered looking from different perspectives. As a quest for pure knowledge, this is excellent. Some of the weaknesses for the scientific community are that it is not for profit and there is a lack of drive. There tends to be more of a sense of argument and the correct solution at the expense of moving farther beyond. In terms of a pure science community, that's excellent, but not for commercial ventures.

In the realm of obtaining funding the ability to communicate the value and what they've learned is very important. One of the pet peeves is the stability of the organization.

The criteria for success is the publication including number, frequency and quality of results. We're trying to influence the community from a scientific perspective.

If we look at the profit-motivated industry striving to change the world and improve product, the value there is not as much different as we might imagine. The biotech community has demonstrated this well. This is a very passionate community that is interested in changing the world.

The regulatory environment is a challenge. The guidelines for interacting aren't very clear.

We snuck in tourism. It has a big 'wow' factor. We are dealing with a very small well-endowed customer base. What is the characteristic of the terrestrial resource community? Right now energy is a $3-4T market. They have tremendous resources. They have a very long ROI tolerance. Twenty years is not a long time. They can change what we do in space if they weigh in.

There is a general negative perspective, especially from the environmental side. They need reliability. Terrestrial energy requirements are probably not that big a challenge in the future. But developing enough fuel for getting into space might become one.

The success criteria is to be sustainable over the long haul. We have to come to them with proof that space resources can solve some terrestrial energy requirements. We need to deal with the 800-pound gorilla. We need to have real tangible evidence and not just lofty statements.

In the aerospace industry the strengths include the technological prowess. The sense of vision will attract a lot of interest when we start having successes. Some of the hot buttons include the movement into commercialization and false starts. The expectations of the big program set people up.

We began by listing our key factors. We want to take advantage of the political state and technology development. We figured cheap launch systems would be our Y axis and ROI would be our X.

The costs of the launch are very prohibitive. The market demand isn't robust because they get sticker shock.

One of the benefits is that this is a researcher's paradise and they want this to happen.

Here is the freeway system. When people see empty highways they don't think about it. They're still available even when they're not being used.

Research science and applied bioscience would benefit from having a launch request. Energy resources are thought of as the industry of space.

We were scenarios of the future. This is high risk/high reward. This is gambler who wins. We saw the quadrant right below them as the poor gambler.

We felt the research community would be interested in this. They would feel there was a high payoff and low risk. Pure researchers might not have as much to say, but the applied scientists would be interested.

In terms of energy resources, we would have enough money available because we would know we would get something. When you have predictability up and down, the infrastructure would be either in place or not.

The high rollers would be where the angel investors are. The poor gamblers would have the fools, friends, and family. On the other side you would have knowledgeable investors.

Our job was to look at NASA projects and extract the lessons learned and which projects worked the best. There were different lessons learned depending on which category you were in. Apollo was the best. It was exciting and it was the first. There was a number of extremely talented groups of people who were thrilled about what they were doing. It was an extraordinary achievement and it touched the public. There was political will and financing behind it. There was no time for the bureaucracy to implement the drag factor.

In science we have both Hubble and Mir. They were uncompromised in being science-driven.

We're a real fan of the research partnership centers. They share goals, tend to be lean and mean. Students are a feature of these programs. Looking at SpaceHab from the government side was a success.

Another commercial success of the space life sciences is that of the top three life science revenue generators, one of them is from space. There have been a lot of spin-offs from life support, implantable insulin pumps, and pace makers.

Everyone knows the satellite story. It provided global coverage in the only way you could. The space shuttle was also a successful program for international relations.

The ISS race is still running. It's meant to be an honest collaborative relationship. The common themes for all of this is integrity - in announcing what you're going to do, and matching the engineering to the project. The best asset is the ability to tell the truth.

The projects that we identified as bad are ones that had technological unrealities. In the shuttle, it's hard to know whether it's a success or a failure. It was the only system. Maybe you don't mix crew and cargo. Maybe you need a diversity of options and match those needs.

We needed an exit strategy and we still don't have that. The social and economic environment moves on and we need to get out of these investments. The shuttle bureaucracy grew fast. It was difficult to get on board at an affordable price. By 1995 it was more expensive to do experiments with proven hardware than it was in 1984.

New commercial opportunities were tied to the shuttle program, but we had bad marketing. We made a lot of promises that we couldn't keep. When it became obvious that we could, we should have turned around and explained that.

Right now the race of the ISS is still running. This is one of the worst political bureaucratic situations I've ever seen. Everyone had an opinion about it. There was an issue of integrity with how we responded. We could have done that differently.

Now that it's flying and overhead we have completely abrogated our community. Maybe the solution for making it more useful is to engage the commercial community. I want to see us get out of LEO and move on. The exit strategy is the same problem, and it needs to serve the investors.

The industrial space facility was identified as a project that should have gone well but went bad. When we looked at two consistent things. It's going to take $20B to do this. They offered us $8B and we said okay. But, of course, we couldn't do it for that.

If we ever get to the stage where the rewards for success are as good as the rewards for failure, we'll have a transformational future.

The shuttle disasters grounded a lot of the push. Perhaps we have a change in the mood of the country. If we don't pay attention to the human capital problem, we will be in deep trouble in the future.

There are two major facets in science. Hypothesis-driven and discovery-driven. If you look at Hubble, Mir, and Viking, they're discovery-based science. We're making things not because we know, but because we want to discover. It's interesting that the paragon examples in NASA are discovery-based. Maybe it's people who have never been in a weightless environment.

NASA tends to go too far. The tools of the biotech have not been developed in space. The nature of biology requires it. You can't drop all your eggs in one basket.

Most of the people in NASA don't know about space biotech. They don't know about the business case of the crystals.

We did an analysis of the space station success. What if you design facilities on space station to conduct research? What if you can put things into the space station in frozen storage and get into the laboratory the things you need? Most of what we get back out of these experiments are 1's and 0's, which is very cheap to bring back. It's much better than bringing everything home with me. If you really want to do biotech, we need to do it in a competitive fashion. This has to be applied to the road to Mars as well.

We need to use an orbital laboratory that is commensurate with science on the ground.

Langdon Morris: I would like to hear what you thought of the last exercise.

I thought it was not that useful. It reiterated what we already knew.

When we identified the issues, the top two jumped right out, so not so interesting. Maybe to have made a list and then worked on the 3rd and 4th issue so it wasn't so obvious.

There was a good interchange of information here. All of this will be available to world at large through the web.

I would like to see an integration across all of these.

When you look at it like this it's hard. I looked at that board over there, and it tells a great story.

It would have been nice if we limited the time a bit and did the second half of the process with the whole group because the way it worked was a bit repetitive. But the exercise was valuable.

It would be nice if we could do case studies and see what's happening in other industries.

What if we took a more historical perspective? This planet has 4 domains: water, land, air and space. All of them have enormous commercial potential. We could see how their respective industries have played out over time.

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I wanted to talk about the Falcon program. One of the advantages of being 30k feet up is to have a decent expansion rate. The cost of launching is probably under $3k a pound. I encourage all of you to make recommendations from NASA to use this. We need to know what the requirements are.

We need to understand what we need to supply, such as an instrument package. What are the common requirements, what orbits do you want to go to? There may be some things that are common to all of you and we could work on providing this, perhaps like return of the payload. There of course will be specific requirements but we can see what we can standardize.

We're the only airlaunch. We can launch out over the ocean. There may be some that are more economical as part of the payload as opposed to part of the vehicle.

There is a possible business here in spacecraft manufacturing. Someone else might do this.

I'm of the opinion that the requirements should come from you. You should know already if you're the launch vehicle. That will tell us how much we're willing to pay for it.

Langdon: What we know about innovation and creativity is not going to the solution too quickly. It's important to get this information out to the general group and stimulate some creative tension. This is some background work which must be done before we go to the next stage.

It is a pleasure to be here. I'm a science techno-nerd and I like that. The picture here is what I called my home and I was there for 5 1/2 months. We came back in May 2003. We did three main tasks on the space station. It is a construction zone right now, and we spent a long time building it. It's just like a sailboat that needs constant upkeep. When we weren't doing upkeep, we did science.

Right now the station is not done. It's like living in a house while you're building it. You have a table saw set up where the dining room should be and a bucket where the kitchen should be. That's what it's like doing science on the space station.

We did programmatic science. It's hypothesis-driven. Because we were there and we could, we developed science of our own. It was discovery science. We distinguished from the programmatic science and our leader called it Saturday Morning Science. (Go to the Saturday Morning Science site) We just dreamed it up and it came to mind because we were in this amazing environment where human intuition doesn't apply because our intuition is honed living on earth with gravity. It changes the way we think. We have very different things that come to mind because our environment is totally different.

We did liquid and mechanical experiments. I'll show you some pictures of that. There's not going to be time to show you all of it.

Any question is fair game. But first let me skip to some video. This is about making thin films of water in a weightless environment. I used Castile soap. Just playing with pure water was more fun than the soap solution. This is the making of a thin film. You can let the surface tension form the film. This is massive compared to a soap film. If you move the water around, you get interesting blobs that move out. You can use it as a 2-dimensional surface vessel. If you put food color on it, you can see the movement. All you have to do is look at forces. Here is the chemistry station. This also doubles as our shower stalls. You can see how thin the structure is when you look at it on its side. The drops of food coloring do not move for hours. They become diffuse over time.

There you can see if you bump the wire how it moves. Now we move from food coloring to mica flakes. They make delightful tracer particles. We got forced convection and once this motion gets started, we see the streak lines to see what the movement is. It will slow down but only after hours.

The question now is, what can you do with these things? One example is that we decided to make a 2-dimensional crystalizer out of it. We used a solution of sodium chloride. We were on a low sodium diet and we had a lot of bottles of salt solutions anyway.

The crystals nucleate to the hot spots. They get kicked off in the solution and then another one forms. This is a demonstration of what you can do with a 2-dimensional surface.

You can reach in and pull out individual crystals. We can also make a protein film. This is blueberry-flavored jello. It's a solution of gelatin. You draw the film out and it hardens into a film. You could put liquid back into these films. If you had something in here that you wanted to react or diffuse, you could put it in there. We put in some of the sodium crystals suspended in the protein film. You can actually cut it out and bring it home with you. This is not any great science in itself, but it might inspire other ideas.

We also did this with sugar crystals. One of the Russian influences is the tea breaks. You can eat your tea with chop sticks. You're not sucking as if it was a straw, but you get a spherical blob and then you can eat it. Notice that the surface of the honey is spherical.

If you put a little drop of water on the can, it will stick to the table.

We now want to change the geometry from sheet to spherical. We're going to look at spheres of water. You start with a thin sheet and then you keep adding water from the straws. You inflate your sheet into a sphere.

The surface-tension forces operating hold it nicely in the frame so it can stay in front of a video camera. You get a big blob of water and it becomes precarious. As soon as the diameter is contained by the hoop then it doesn't go anywhere.

A third way to do it is to lasso a blob of water with your hoop. You can draw off some of the water with a towel. You can also use it as a meniscus lens.

Here is a syringe filled with water and mica flakes. This is a 60mm blob of water. We're going to look at the mixing pattern of the sphere of mixed water with clear water. I had an idea of what was going to happen. Turns out I was completely wrong. What actually happens is that you get a vortex ring. Once I saw it, I could use my physics and chemistry to explain why this happens, but I didn't have enough imagination to predict it. That's why we have to do discovery science. Our imagination is not as vivid as nature. We only find out what she has in store for us by going out in nature and making observations.

When the needle punctures the surface, it looks like smoke coming out of a smokestack. It is explainable through science arguments, but until you do the experiment you would not predict it.

This next one is the big sphere. We want to make a sphere of water the size of my head. It makes a nice magnifier. I was trying to get my head behind it. The ratio between surface tension force will reduce as the size of the sphere becomes larger.

What might we be able to do with a big sphere of water? The syringe here has an opening of about 6mm. You can inject about 10cc's of air. We're about 2cm away. We're going to put a delta function into this sphere and see what happens. This was a jaw dropping moment. These oscillations would go on for 20 minutes or more. It makes a crater and ripples around and comes around to the antipodal point. The ripples expand to the diameter cord and make a spurt of water come out. You have surface waves go out, body waves going through it, and you get the interplay through it. The interactions of all these waves was a jaw-dropping movement. You don't see this on small spheres because of the ratio.

We also have the inverse of we just saw. If we drive oscillations into the center we have just the opposite of what we just saw. It would be very difficult to look at a spherical bubble this size because of the gravitational force.

The interesting thing happens at the end of this operation. We drove the oscillations, and inside the inner bubble is a droplet. We injected droplets into the center sphere. Now you have a 3D-billiard game happening between the droplets. Sometimes a collision with the wall will involve a mass transfer across the interface. It imparts momentum and drives the droplets off with a finite mass transfer.

There is a mass transfer and it gets momentum. There are 6 to 8 bounces before a mass transfer. So what governs the mass transfer? Why does only part of the drop get amalgamated? There are a lot of neat questions with this.

We would have never predicted this behavior. We were able to make these investigations to see what nature has in store for us. If we get a droplet rolling around, the radial motion keeps it on the inner wall of the bubble. Is this sliding like a hockey puck? Or rolling like a ball across the carpet? If it's rolling, there's friction. There's an interface and we've learned that there's a no-slip boundary between interfaces.

We also did some tracer particles and saw some vortex rings again. There it looks like it's rolling, but how could it do that if there is no friction?

Next thing is to drop an effervescent tablet into the sphere of water. Let's assume there is a chemical reaction at the interface. We had two preconceived ideas. One is that it forms bubbles, they coalesce, and the reaction is quenched. That's the gas-film quench model. Maybe it forms little bubbles. Then you get another layer of bubbles formed below the layer that just formed. This one we called the expanding beer head model. Turns out both of those are wrong.

What happens is a lot of bubbles form immediately, they coalesce, and once it forms, little bubbles get eaten. You end up getting two bubble parts. The bigger bubbles eat the smaller bubbles, but if you're small enough, they get ignored. Eventually you'll end up with a couple of big bubbles.

Being an engineer type we want to get rid of all this gas. We suck out the big bubble and then mix it. You can recover the initial liquid from the foamy mess by turning it in a circle. You basically suck it out like a vacuum.

This is a geeky thing. This is a rotating bolt going through an elastic collision. This is the interplay between angular and linear momentum.

Here we have three compact disc players and watched how they move depending on whether they are turned on or off. If they're turned on you have a stabilized geoscopic orbit caused by the spinning CD inside the player.

What can you do with this? Now you have a third hand and you listen to music at the same time.

We have these really nice watches that NASA issues. They're optimal for space use and they issue this after you've been assigned to fly. After you get back to earth, they pull it off your wrist because it is so valuable. During the mission they broke and I decided to take it apart. I took all the little screws out in a weightless environment. This was to prove that we can do the epitome of precision work. If you're careful you can even take your watch apart.

This illustrates that you always use the right tool for the job, which is whatever tool you have. There's all these really nice tooling marks. You use duck tape to stick things to.

The space station is an amazing machine. We should be proud of this. It gets maligned but I liken it to a teenager. Sometimes you want to disavow any association to your teenager and sometimes you swell up with pride and say, "That's my boy!" The space station is just like that. We can use it as an orbital laboratory.

I want to show you some astrophotography. We had the good fortune to view a full solar eclipse. It looks just like you see in the physics books. We have a stacked mosaic star field.

This is a large Magellan cloud. Taking photos like this from the space station shows how well the gyro is. These exposures are 30 seconds to a minute.

Being able to look at the limn of the earth is something very special from the space station. You can see so many interesting things. We could do this with satellites but we don't do that. We have them focused on nadir perspectives.

The green glowing thing is our atmosphere. We have known about it for about 100 years, but to see it is something you have to do from space when you're looking obliquely through airpace. Here's another example of atmospheric air glow with borealis going on. In this one the atmosphere is an orange color. The sliver of blue means we're close to the day/night terminator. The sun is scattering sodium ions from the atmosphere. The atomic oxygen gives you this orange color.

I also have some star-field photos. Here they have some streaks. This is in a different orbital attitude where space station makes one spin around the orbit of earth. This is not the north pole. This is the polar region from our orbit.

This is a star streak picture with stars and cities streaking. Cities at night are amazing consequences of human activity. They may be the most beautiful unintentional consequence of humans. They are blurry because of orbital motion.

We took the IMAX camera mount but we didn't have an IMAX camera. We modified it a bit with a bolt from an unmanned Russian transport vehicle. We use the camera as a telescope. We have rigged it also with a Makita drill to accurately compensate for the orbital motion. If you're an amateur astronomer you will understand that this is nothing more than a barn door tracker. We can show you the difference between photos taken by hand and this contraption.

We took close to 2000 images of cities at night, both big cities and small villages, all over the world. We have Montreal because we go there quite a bit for training. We have Chicago, New York City, Los Angeles, the Bay Area, Tokyo, Sao Paolo, Singapore, River Nile, Milan, Iran, Riyadh, Miami, El Paso, Houston, Washington DC, Baltimore.

We found that cities around the world have different characteristics based on their geography. Tokyo has a blue-green look. When you look at certain places on earth, sometimes it looks like constellations.

Cities in South America have a different feel than those in North America. The cities of Asia have very different characteristics than western places. They almost look like oriental dragons. In Europe they have more of a fractal pattern. There is a cultural imprint on how you design your cities and the distribution of light.

You see patterns from space that you can't see on the ground or even in airplanes. Washington DC is a great example that you can see geographical-political boundaries. Same thing in Baltimore. Some of the older cities along the east coast have bizarre light patterns that show the old city outline. When you go out west you see no distinction like that.

When I was giving a talk in Washington DC, someone commented on how it must be the brightest city on earth, but I had to tell them that it was indeed another city and that is the brightest - Las Vegas.

To summarize I would say that the space station is an amazing machine. We should all be proud of it. It's an orbital laboratory which is commensurate of doing science on the ground. We have a healthy mix of programmatic science as well as discovery science. When you work in an environment like that, who knows what we'll discover. The more we can send people into space and have more exploration in space, the more we're going to learn and benefit in society.

Q: What did it smell like when you first arrived on the space station?
A: It smelled like an engine room. We have great scrubbers that keep it clean. We take a couple of showers a day. We exercise a lot. We're pretty clean folks.

Q: Seems like things improved a great deal since Apollo.
A: This is one of the progressions that NASA has made. You can't do the kind of science on shuttles that you can do on a space station. We worked several hours a day and then we had free time. What we called that was the orbital scrimshaw. Each astronaut did his own thing. Watch DVDs, write email or do science. You folks during the Apollo days didn't have the freedom we had.

Q: Would you go back if you had the chance?
A: Space is very seductive. Once you have an experience of it, you have this incredible yearning to go back. Before you fly you have a hypothetical idea of what it's like, but once you know, you yearn to go back. I can hardly wait to go back. Another aspect of living in space was that it was like the closest thing I've ever had to the fountain of youth. I ate an incredible number of calories and lost 14 pounds. All the little aches and pains they talk about go away in a couple of weeks. If I could immigrate to space, I would. If we had the technology, I would load up my wife and kids and move to space. But for now the technology is too fragile.

Q: I've never seen the lights off in the station. Do you ever get the full blackness of space?
A: On shuttle missions, the work is 24 hours a day. On space station, you go to bed at night. You can't get by on 4 hours a night. People sleep at night. You can creep out of your sleep sack and open the window shade and look out at earth and the stars.

Q: Bob Bigelow proposes to have a transparent dome that you could be tethered up to a craft in space. Do you think that would be too scary?
A: It would be a wonderful experience. I'm sure some would find it too scary.

Q: How would you describe the makeup of the first mixed crew to Mars?
A: A mixed crew might work. All male work. I'm sure all female crews would work. I'm sure we'll send a mixed crew and I hope we send more than less. Some of the most capable missions were about 20 people.

Q: Do your children want to become astronauts?
A: They used to. Now it's doctors and policemen.

I want to talk to you about Dr. Pellis this evening and give him a chance to speak to us again. We want to acknowledge him and other people. I would like to give you a longer background on him. The most important thing about the award we're going to give him is what it represents. Lynn Harper who is passionate about the commercialization of space chose him because she wants to acknowledge how he represents the entrepreneurial spirit he's brought to space development. We want this to be the first step in honoring him from his peers in how you represent the success of the future of this forum.

Please join me in welcoming Dr. Pellis to the podium.

There are a few times when you get caught off guard and this is one of them. These things don't happen without a lot of people. To the program of Johnson's Space Center my first thanks go. We were just trying to do a good job. We have supported this over the years. This doesn't happen with one person. There is a very energetic team at Johnson Space Center that worked on this. Ames eventually joined with us.

If you look at our growth curve, we started out with a handful of investigators and at its zenith of its total family was in the range of 145. This doesn't happen with one person. Melanie Anderson was the deputy of this and was instrumental, as was Dave Wolfe, Ray Schwartz, and Tim.

I had a short series of stuff that we might want to do. Because we had talked about this, there's the bioreactor. Basically we focused on four areas. We made models of human disease, such as cancer. We also participated in vaccine and drug development. This is a true biotechnological effort. We're looking to take this into that arena. Human cells when put under conditions of space become permissive to the propagation of micro-organisms. We cannot easily explain this biochemically. We've done this in the past. If you take psychlospora, which is in raspberries and strawberries from South America, we have not been able to propagate it only in the rotating biosystem. It's a very interesting proposition.

The significant point is that in tissue engineering you need to have the freedom to grow in 3 dimensions. We have great results in this. As cells propagate, you make a serial matrix that holds the cells together. This is not trivial. If you can make a type-1 matrix protein of collagen, that is significant. I could get rid of everything else in your body except for that and you would still be recognizable. It's in your original cell that you were made of. Everything that you are comes from that.

In space the first 4 stages have been done. In colon cancer cell cultures, we show the difference of the research done in a standard culture, the ground bioreactor and in space. They assembled much more robustly in space. Please watch how both of them rotate. As the assembly takes place, and time progresses, you'll see how one of them looks like a bone metastases. The important thing about this is that the tumor cells gave us specific signals. We need to think differently about treatment. We imagine that this will be true also for breast cancerous cells.

We couldn't understand why this takes place. I realized that cells are doing a number of things Don Pettit showed in his experiments. He used non-dairy creamer and got us to the same thing that we were seeing in our cultures.

I am incredibly grateful for this. Honestly I was just having a good time and I would like to do this again. I wish you the best of luck with this commercial development and I hope to be a part of it for a very long time.