{"id":17274,"date":"2023-07-30T23:52:40","date_gmt":"2023-07-30T15:52:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp-productionenv-bjg9h2g2bgg5b8aa.southeastasia-01.azurewebsites.net\/news\/seattle-event-sets-a-course-for-research-on-international-space-station-and-its-heirs\/"},"modified":"2023-07-30T23:52:40","modified_gmt":"2023-07-30T15:52:40","slug":"seattle-event-sets-a-course-for-research-on-international-space-station-and-its-heirs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/news\/seattle-event-sets-a-course-for-research-on-international-space-station-and-its-heirs\/","title":{"rendered":"Seattle event sets a course for research on International Space Station \u2014 and its heirs"},"content":{"rendered":"<figure class=\"wp-block-image size-full-width\"><img fetchpriority=\"high\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"630\" height=\"420\" src=\"https:\/\/cdn.geekwire.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/07\/230730-iss-630x420.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-783605\" srcset=\"https:\/\/cdn.geekwire.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/07\/230730-iss-630x420.jpg 630w, https:\/\/cdn.geekwire.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/07\/230730-iss-1260x840.jpg 1260w, https:\/\/cdn.geekwire.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/07\/230730-iss-768x512.jpg 768w, https:\/\/cdn.geekwire.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/07\/230730-iss-1536x1024.jpg 1536w, https:\/\/cdn.geekwire.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/07\/230730-iss.jpg 2048w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 630px) 100vw, 630px\"><figcaption data-nosnippet=\"\" class=\"wp-element-caption\">NASA astronaut Woody Hoburg monitors a cube-shaped Astrobee robotic free-flyer during an experiment on the International Space Station. (NASA Photo)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>About 900 members of the space community \u2014 including astronauts, government officials, researchers and industry professionals \u2014 are converging on Seattle this week for the International Space Station Research and Development Conference.<\/p>\n<p>But this week\u2019s ISSRDC event is about more than just the ISS.<\/p>\n<p>The 12th annual conference, which is being held in the Pacific Northwest for the first time, comes as NASA and its commercial partners are making plans for privately operated outposts that will take the place of the ISS when it\u2019s brought down from orbit. That fiery retirement party is currently set for the 2030-2031 time frame.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe\u2019re at that critical juncture,\u201d said Patrick O\u2019Neill, marketing and communications manager for the Center for the Advancement of Science in Space, or CASIS. The center manages the activities that the ISS takes on in its role as a national laboratory, and is the organizer of the ISSRDC.<\/p>\n<p>For now, the ISS is one of only two space stations in low Earth orbit, or LEO. (The other one is China\u2019s Tiangong space station.) But the next seven years are likely to see the launch of multiple commercial LEO destinations, which have come to be known as CLDs in NASA\u2019s three-letter-acronym parlance. One of those CLDs could well be Orbital Reef, which is currently under development by a consortium that includes Jeff Bezos\u2019 Blue Origin space venture.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThis conference is a great opportunity for us to learn about future avenues of inquiry that could be advantageous for other government agencies, and ways for us to build on the science that\u2019s been done previously, so that we can segue toward those CLDs,\u201d O\u2019Neill told GeekWire.<\/p>\n<p>Blue Origin, Boeing and other Seattle-area aerospace companies will be well-represented at the event, and the list of speakers includes some of the up-and-coming executives in Washington state\u2019s space industry \u2014 such as Colin Doughan, CEO of Marysville-based Gravitics, which is working on modules for future space stations; Kelly Hennig, chief operating officer of Kent-based Stoke Space, which is developing a fully reusable launch system; and Lisa Rich, chief operating officer of Redmond-based Xplore, which is pioneering a \u201cSpace as a Service\u201d business model.<\/p>\n<p>Space station research will be Topic A for this week\u2019s conference \u2014 and O\u2019Neill said the guiding principles for managing that research have evolved since the creation of CASIS in 2011.<\/p>\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-block-embed-youtube wp-embed-aspect-16-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio\">\n<iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"The International Space Station: A Laboratory in Space\" width=\"800\" height=\"450\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/TiUvXmRDwEQ?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen=\"\"><\/iframe><br \/>\n<\/figure>\n<p>\u201cBack in the day when CASIS first assumed management of the national laboratory, the mission statement was to leverage the space-based environment for the benefit of life here on Earth,\u201d he recalled. \u201cWhereas now we\u2019ve expanded that a little bit: It\u2019s not just trying to benefit life on Earth, but also to enable a sustainable market in low Earth orbit.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>O\u2019Neill said more and more companies are see. And some of those companies aren\u2019t the sorts of ventures that you\u2019d typically associate with outer space. For example, one space station research project involves Lamborghini, the Italian sports-car company, working in partnership with  the Houston Methodist Research Institute.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThey\u2019re coming together because Houston Medical Research Institute is looking to create an implantable device for therapeutics,\u201d O\u2019Neill said. \u201cAnd Lamborghini was able to develop some carbon-fiber 3D-printed technologies and send those to the space station. Those [carbon-fiber materials] might end up being on the outside of that implantable chip.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Medicine and the life sciences are high on the ISS\u2019 research agenda, in part because minimizing the negative health effects of long-term weightlessness will be essential for future treks to Mars and other deep-space destinations. <\/p>\n<p>One of the speakers at this week\u2019s ISSRDC is Arun Sharma, a stem cell researcher at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. In May, Sharma and his team worked with Seattle\u2019s Allen Institute for Cell Science on an space station experiment aimed at studying how zero-G conditions could facilitate the production of millions of stem cells for therapeutic applications. That particular experiment was flown as part of a privately funded Axiom Space mission.<\/p>\n<p>O\u2019Neill said Sharma has a unique perspective on space station research. \u201cHe has done things through the \u2018traditional\u2019 method of leveraging the space station, but now he\u2019s doing it through private-astronaut options \u2014 which opens up new avenues, not only for people to access space quite literally, but also for them to be able to leverage the space station from an R&amp;D perspective,\u201d O\u2019Neill said.<\/p>\n<p>In O\u2019Neill\u2019s view, Seattle is the perfect place to highlight the blending of space-based research and down-to-Earth technologies \u2014 which is where the space station\u2019s research program is heading.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cSeattle obviously has a very rich history in technology innovation. And there\u2019s also a variety of partners that are already affixed to the space station program or are getting further involved in space, whether that\u2019s Blue Origin, Boeing or Microsoft,\u201d he said. \u201cSo it\u2019s a very tech-laden community where those who are interested in becoming part of the space station research community can definitely come and check it out, and learn a little bit more about what\u2019s happening on station and how it applies to their R&amp;D.\u201d<\/p>\n<p><em>This week\u2019s International Space Station Research and Development Conference will run from Monday through Thursday at the Hyatt Regency Seattle. Check the ISSRDC website for further information on registration and the agenda.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>NASA astronaut Woody Hoburg monitors a cube-shaped Astrobee robotic free-flyer during an experiment on the International Space Station. (NASA Photo) About 900 members of the space community \u2014 including astronauts, government officials, researchers and industry professionals \u2014 are converging on Seattle this week for the International Space Station Research and Development Conference. But this week\u2019s [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[717,4543,4544],"class_list":["post-17274","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","tag-international-space-station","tag-issrdc","tag-research-and-development"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17274"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17274"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17274\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17274"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17274"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17274"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}