The International Space Station is arguably the coolest science project ever. It's a football field-sized tangle of capsules and solar panels orbiting 250 miles above the planet at 17,150 mph. Getting it up there took five space agencies representing 26 different countries, each chipping in billions of dollars to fund thousands of rumple-clothed engineers who pulled countless all-nighters to design and build the component parts, load them into payload fairings, and launch them into low Earth orbit. On rockets. Lots of rockets.
What's possibly even cooler is what comes next: the Journey to Mars. NASA announced its intention to reach the red planet a year ago, and the ISS will play an important role. NASA will use the US-controlled facilities on the station to prepare equipment, and the human body, for survival in deep space. Well, not all the US facilities. Just half of them. The other half---half of all up and down cargo load, half of all research resources, half of astronaut crew time---is actually under the control of a small-ish Florida nonprofit organization called the Center for the Advancement of bet365体育赛事 in Space.
You've probably never heard of Casis. Born in 2010 from an act of Congress, it's a nonprofit that gets $15 million of NASA's budget every year---along with that half share of the US-controlled part of the ISS. With that investment, it's supposed to get scientists, businesses, and educators to take full advantage of the station. Executing that mission means providing grants to spaceworthy academic science, soliciting donations, doing PR, and selling biotech and materials science companies on the idea that they could improve their products by doing microgravity research on the ISS.
But after nearly five years, Casis still hasn't found its groove. Its fundraising is close to nil, and there's no long queue of private companies demanding access to the station's research facilities. The company's biggest success has been providing grants and/or station access to both academic and commercial research. But it's not really possible to measure that success, because Casis has not developed sufficient benchmarks against which to measure its actions—despite requests from government inspectors to do so.
NASA isn't off the hook either. The agency has been shirking its legal responsibility to create a committee to liaise with Casis and help it determine the best use of the ISS's facilities. On NASA's side, there's barely any paper trail at all, which makes it really hard for anyone to keep tabs on the nonprofit organization in charge of 50 percent of the US's coolest science project.
Remember a few months ago, during San Diego Comic-Con, when the director of Guardians of the Galaxy 2 announced that NASA was sending mission patches featuring Rocket Raccoon and Groot to the ISS? Well, that memory isn't totally correct. NASA, as a government agency, isn't allowed to seek corporate sponsors. What actually happened is that Casis scored an advertising partnership with Disney.
The Rocket and Groot patch is one of Casis' most visible victories. But it's not the only one. According to its metrics, Casis has given 129 scientific projects access to the ISS. It has helped provide STEM programs to nearly 180,000 participants. Its social media, web presence, and outreach efforts have reached hundreds of thousands more. Each year it has funded, supported, and sent more projects into space. Since 2011, Casis has helped launch over 7,000 pounds of stuff into low Earth orbit.
Those are pretty good numbers, but it's hard to tell whether they indicate that Casis is achieving its larger mission. "It's a classic case of a creature of Congress, created without the appropriate oversight and with a lot of murkiness in terms of what its reporting requirements are," says Keith Cowing, who runs the blog NASAWatch. He has spent years calling out Casis for taking the ISS for granted. "My ongoing rant is, how does Casis make decisions? How does NASA vet their reports?" he says.
Congress has been asking the same questions. In 2015, Lamar Smith, Republican chairman of the House science committee, asked the Government Accountability Office to review Casis. The GAO found that while the organization reports its activities both quarterly and annually, it still hasn't developed benchmarks against which to measure its performance. "The report doesn’t actually get into the metrics that a lot of folks would like to see in terms of results," says a congressional aide to the science committee, "and that is attracting private sector."
A 2013 Office of the Inspector General audit found many of the same communications and reporting lapses. "The basis for internal controls is that you have to have some formal feedback mechanisms to hold yourself accountable," says Marie Mak, the lead author of the GAO inspection. Without them, Casis doesn’t have an objective way to measure its progress.
Both the GAO and OIG reports also questioned how well NASA and Casis were coordinating their research efforts. The 2010 law that essentially created Casis also required NASA to create a committee---the ISS National Laboratory Advisory Committee---to act as a liaison between the nonprofit and the agency. But so far, NASA has refused to staff this board.
"NASA believes that the structure and function of the Casis Board of Directors has proven to be a superior alternative to INLAC," a NASA representative wrote when I asked if the committee had been set up yet. And maybe it is. But NASA is breaking the law by refusing to create it.
The GAO report pointed out that the Casis board was not the same as having the committee. In response, NASA told the GAO it would petition Congress to change the law to match the current system. But that hasn't happened. "If NASA really did think there wasn't a reason to staff the INLAC committee, they could have made a request to the subcommittee to change the law," says the aide. "So far, they haven't made that request."
And not having a committee, in some ways, denies the public a way to keep track of how the US' portion of the ISS is being managed. Because here's a thing: NASA admits that it keeps no record of its communications with Casis. "There's a lot of informal dialogue that goes on between the two organizations," says Mak. But there's no public record of these daily communiques. And even worse, no record of NASA's feedback (if it even exists) for the performance reports that Casis produces each quarter and once a year.
Just to be clear: None of the reports, congressional hearings, or reporting suggests that Casis or NASA are doing anything blatantly wrong (besides ignoring the INLAC committee). But this is the ISS. The coolest science project ever. It needs to be managed with excellence.
Casis gets $15 million each year. But it also gets free launches and free working hours from astronauts. Anybody with a car and a job knows transportation and labor cost money. Also, there's an opportunity cost: Every ounce launched up there, every square inch of equipment, every astronaut working hour is mass, space, and attention not given to something else.
And some people in NASA are worried this might affect the Journey to Mars. Casis' mission of developing commercial interest in low Earth orbit is a part of that plan, though not directly. (Casis is concerned with Earth-facing research.) A robust commercial presence in low Earth orbit would free NASA to focus more resources on the Mars goal.
NASA has a three-phase plan for going to Mars. The first is called "Earth Reliant," and it uses the ISS as a testing platform to make sure NASA has the right tech and information to keep astronauts alive for a Martian turnaround. The second and third phases focus on making space missions that are closed systems—independent of Earth.
Which brings us to March, when the NASA Advisory Council released a memo that included this:
Those 96 bloodless words outline the advisory council's fear that Casis isn't doing its job of attracting commercial vendors to the ISS, and that might mess with NASA's plans. Casis should be trying hard to attract users---but without internal benchmarks, how can they tell whether their programs are moving in the right direction?
Ken Shields, director of operations for Casis, takes issue with the assessment. "This is one man’s opinion, but there were a few vociferous members of NAC who didn’t do a lot of due diligence on what we do, our history," he says. "They read some news stories, brought some gotcha information, and I wish I had been there in person."
Shields believes a lot of the criticism leveled against Casis isn't quite fair. For one, he says they do have benchmarks. Casis produces annual reports, and NASA apparently uses those reports to grade Casis’ performance. What he considers benchmarks however, the GAO does not.
What he will say is this: Casis is doing a very unique thing. And that's true. No other nonprofit organization in history has had partial control of a space station. Nor the responsibility to develop a mature commercial market for low Earth orbit research. They are working from scratch. "We are going to be a lot smarter in the next two to three fiscal cycles," says Shields.
Which sounds reasonable, until you remember that the ISS only has about eight fiscal cycles—read: years—until NASA quits using it and focuses its resources on Mars. That doesn't necessarily mean the space station gets scuttled. If Casis sells enough companies on microgravity research, the ISS could have an afterlife.
"Here's my editorial vector on this: You've got a space station in outer space and you're doing stuff like this?" says Cowing, of NASAWatch. Stuff like this is not a knock at the Rocket and Groot mission patches. He's frustrated that the majority of Casis' measurable activities are things that NASA could just as easily do—like give grants to university research. If anything, he thinks Casis should be doing more PR stunts, more fundraising, more commercial partnerships.
The House science committee is also waiting for Casis to do more, according to its staffers. "The clock is ticking on the termination of the ISS. Because of such long lead times in research and development, we expect to see some returns here in the very near term," says the committee aide. Because the coolest science project ever has less than a decade before it goes cold.
