Scientists at ISS will be working overtime
The real work out there can beginWith the space station nearing completion, astronauts can trade hard hats for test tubes
ERIC BERGER, HOUSTON CHRONICLE
Published 5:30 am, Sunday, September 20, 2009
Photo: Eric Kayne, Chronicle
Biochemist Peggy Whitson, showing off a Soyuz capsule mock-up, lauds the scientific capacity of the space station, where she has spent more than a year total in two separate tours.
Experiments like these inside a mock-up of the international space station will be carried out in three pressurized modules, which will contain all kinds of scientific equipment found in labs on Earth. The important difference? No gravity. less
Experiments like these inside a mock-up of the international space station will be carried out in three pressurized modules, which will contain all kinds of scientific equipment found in labs on Earth. The ... more
After 15 years of construction, narrow congressional votes, delays and, yes, cost overruns, the $100 billion international space station finally appears ready for prime time.
The orbiting station, which in size and scope far exceeds anything humans have ever put into space, recently has been on quite a roll.
In May the space station doubled its crew from three to six astronauts, and this summer two space shuttle missions delivered a new laboratory and critical scientific equipment.
Then, earlier this month, a panel appointed by President Barack Obama to study the future of human spaceflight gave the station high marks, recommending its life be extended until at least 2020 and full funding to reach its potential.
The station is now beginning to do just that, as astronauts use the ISS for its intended purpose as an outpost for scientific research in a weightless environment, and learning to live for long periods in space.
"Today is so much easier than it was in 1994," said the station program's deputy manager, Kirk Shireman, who joined NASA back then, when the ISS was emerging from the ashes of the space station Freedom program.
Space shuttle Endeavour returns home
"The beauty, from a personal standpoint, is that we are finally seeing the rewards today."
Until now, crew efforts have focused on assembling disparate modules built by Russia, the United States, Japan and Europe into a cohesive whole. Since habitation began in 2000, therefore, astronauts have devoted only about 12,000 hours to scientific research.
Now with the crew expansion, and likely completion of the station by early 2011 allowing astronauts to swap their hard hats for test tubes, NASA estimates that total to increase by a factor of eight by 2015, to about 90,000 hours.
"We're just beginning to scratch the surface," said Julie Robinson, who oversees the ISS science program.
Gravity's the problem
When Earth-bound scientists conduct experiments, they control all sorts of factors: Is it light or dark in the lab? What is the temperature? What is the pressure?
Yet every experiment conducted on Earth must necessarily include gravity.
It may seem paradoxical, but when gravity is removed from an experiment, scientists can actually learn more about life on Earth.
Arizona State University infectious disease researcher Cheryl Nickerson has found that some microbes such as salmonella become 10 times or more deadly in microgravity. This is obviously of concern to astronauts considering long stays in space, like during a voyage to Mars.
But the finding turns out to have surprising significance for humans at home.
Microgravity changes which genes in salmonella bacteria are turned on and off. By watching which genes are activated in space, scientists have determined which ones are primarily responsible for the heightened virulence of the bacteria.
An Austin-based company, Astrogenetix, has found that by deleting these "virulence" genes, they can create a strain of salmonella that will still infect humans but not make them sick  -  a potential vaccine.
The company says it is applying to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to begin clinical trials of its vaccine, possibly by next year. It also plans to work with other organisms, such as methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA, on the station by signing commercial agreements with NASA.
"We see the station as a really powerful new platform for scientific research," said John Porter, chief executive officer of Astrogenetix.
Although it has signed at least six commercial agreements with private partners, NASA still has openings for outside research on the station, which has been designated a national lab. Marybeth Edeen, manager of the ISS National Lab Office, says it is her goal to get experiments proposed by scientists onto the station in as little as six months.
Not everyone's a fan
To be sure, there have been promises of scientific payoff from space stations before, and sometimes they have proven spectacularly wrong. In the mid-1980s, one space analyst predicted that by the year 2000 space pharmaceuticals would be worth tens of billions of dollars.
The failure of the space station to deliver on such grandiose promises, and the fact that it only flies a few hundred miles above the Earth, have led some critics to decry it for impeding exploration of deeper space by robots and humans.
"The space station stands as the greatest single obstacle to the continued exploration of space," University of Maryland-College Park physicist Robert Park told Congress a decade ago in an effort to kill the project, and he still feels that way.
Other scientists worry that the station has consumed too much of NASA's budget for scientific inquiry.
"People say, 'Well, you haven't cured cancer yet up there,' " said astronaut Peggy Whitson, a biochemist who spent six months on the station in 2002, and again in 2007-08. "They haven't cured cancer on the ground, either."
The point, she said, is that critics don't realize the scientific capacity now in space.
The goal since Apollo
Standing inside a life-size mock-up of the space station at Johnson Space Center, Whitson walks  -  she says floating is much more fun  -  between the seven pressurized modules or "rooms" currently on the station. Three of them, the Destiny, Harmony and Kibo modules, are primarily devoted to scientific research.
They contain freezers, incubators, centrifuges, combustion chambers, mice habitats and all manner of scientific equipment found in Earth-bound labs.
Asked what the space shuttle's legacy will be to NASA, the manager of the program that has delivered major components of the ISS to orbit unhesitatingly says the station.
"I don't think people understand what is orbiting the Earth right now," John Shannon said.
"The people who worked around here during Apollo, that was their goal after landing on the moon, to have what we have up there now. Not just the engineering achievement, but the international partnership piece of it. It's just an amazing achievement. It's a great foothold."