International Space Station

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International Space Station

The International Space Station (ISS) is a scientific and technological wonder. It is a dream being realized by a multinational partnership. The ISS provides a permanent human presence in space and a symbol of advancement for humankind.^* There is great promise and discovery awaiting those who will use the space station.

Just as the global explorers of the fifteenth century circled the globe in their square-sailed schooners in search of riches—gold, spices, fountains of youth, and other precious resources—so too is the space station a wind-jammer plowing the waves of space, exploration the riches it holds. The space station brings together the adventure of fifteenth-century explorers with twenty-first-century technology and industry. The space station is, at its essence, an infrastructure that will facilitate and transmit new knowledge, much like that provided through the virtual world of the Internet. In regard to the space station, the question is: From where will the value of this virtual world come? Or, put in terms of the fifteenth-century explorers, "What is the spice of the twenty-first century in the new frontier of space?"

At this stage, no one can guess what the most valuable and profound findings from space station research will be. Space research done to date, however, does point the way to potential areas of promise that will be further explored on the ISS. The space environment has been used to observe Earth and its ecosphere, explore the universe and the mystery of its origin, and study the effects of space on humans and other biological systems, on fluid flow, and on materials and pharmaceutical production.

The space station creates a state-of-the-art laboratory to explore ourselves and the world. The discoveries we have made to date in space, while significant, are only the foundation for what is to come. Research in microgravity is in its infancy. Throughout the thousands of years that physical phenomena have been observed, including the relatively recent 400 years of documented observations, it has been only in the period since the 1960s that experiments in microgravity of more than a few seconds have been observed; only since the late 1990s has there been a coordinated set of microgravity experiments in space. The most telling indicator is that by the end of 2001 more than half of all microgravity experiments had been conducted since 1998.

History is rife with failed predictions. Nevertheless, perhaps the best way to try to predict the future is to look at the evolution of the past, using history and the current situation as a jumping-off point, while recognizing the challenge in predicting the future. The following represents an attempt to peer into the future, to see what promise lies ahead for the space station by looking at the past and the present.

Previous Advances from Space Activities

In the twentieth century, space exploration had a profound impact on the way we viewed ourselves and the world in which we live. Viewing our planet from space for the first time gave us a unique perspective of Earth as a single, integrated whole. Observations of Earth's atmosphere, land, and oceans have allowed us to better understand our planet as a system and, in doing so, our role in that integrated whole. Many aspects of our lives that are now taken for granted were enabled, at least in part, by investments in space. Whether making a transpacific telephone call, designing with a computer-aided design tool, using a mobile phone, wearing a pacemaker, or going for an MRI, we are using technology that space exploration either developed or improved.

In the early twenty-first century, commercial interests offer a myriad of products and services that either use the environment of space or the results of research performed in microgravity. Just a few examples include:

Satellite communications: Private companies have operated communications satellites for decades. Today, private interests build, launch, and operate a rapidly expanding telecommunications infrastructure in space. The initial investment in space of the United States helped fuel the information revolution that spurs much of the nation's economy today.
Earth observation/remote sensing: A growing market for Earth imagery is opening up new commercial opportunities in space. Private interests now sell and buy pictures taken from Earth orbit. Land-use planners, farmers, and environmental preservationists can use the commercially offered imagery to assess urban growth, evaluate soil health, and track deforestation.
Recombinant human insulin: The Hauptman-Woodward Medical Research Institute, in collaboration with Eli Lilly and Company, has used structural information obtained from crystals grown in space to better understand the nuances of binding between insulin and various drugs. Researchers there are working on designing new drugs that will bind to insulin, improving their use as treatments for diabetic patients.

What all these discoveries have in common is that they use space as a resource for the improvement of human conditions. Efforts aboard the ISS will continue this human spirit of self-improvement and introspection. And the twenty-first century holds even greater promise with the advent of a permanent human presence in space, allowing that same spirit to be a vital link in the exploration process. The space station will maximize its particular assets: prolonged exposure to microgravity and the presence of human experimenters in the research process.

Potential Space Station-Based Research

The ISS will provide a laboratory that can have profound implications on human health issues on Earth. Many of the physiological changes that astronauts experience during long-term flight resemble changes in the human body normally associated with aging on Earth. Bone mass is lost and muscles atrophy , and neither appear to heal normally in space. By studying the changes in astronauts' bodies, scientists might begin to understand more about the aging process. Scientists sponsored by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration are collaborating with the National Institutes of Health in an effort to explore the use of spaceflight as a model for the process of aging. This knowledge may be translated into medical wonders, such as speeding the healing of bones and thereby reducing losses in productivity. By beginning to understand the process by which bones degenerate, scientists might be able to reverse the process and expedite the generation of bone mass.

The microgravity environment offers the opportunity to remove a fundamental physical property—gravity—in the study of fluid flow, material growth, and other phenomena. The impacts on combustion, chemistry, biotechnology, and material development are promising and exciting. The combustion process, a complex reaction involving chemical, physical, and thermal properties, is at the core of modern civilization, providing over 85 percent of the world's energy needs. By studying this process on the ISS, commercial enterprises could realize significant savings by introducing new-found efficiencies.

Researchers have found that microgravity provides them with new tools to address two fundamental aspects of biotechnology: the growth of high-quality crystals for the study of proteins and the growth of three-dimensional tissue samples in laboratory cultures. On Earth, gravity distorts the shape of crystalline structures, while tissue cultures fail to take on their full three-dimensional structure.

The microgravity environment aboard the ISS will therefore provide a unique location for biotechnology research, especially in the fields of protein crystal growth and cell/tissue culturing. Protein crystals produced in space for drug research are superior to crystals that can be grown on Earth. Previous research performed on space-grown crystals has already increased knowledge about such diseases as AIDS, emphysema, influenza, and diabetes. With help from space-based research, pharmaceutical companies are testing new drugs for future markets.

In addition to these scientific findings, the ISS serves as a real-world test of the value of continuous human presence in space. There are already companies focused on space tourism and the desire to capitalize on the human presence in space. A myriad of future scenarios are possible, and the imagination of entrepreneurs will play a key role.

Inevitably, private interests will move to develop orbital infrastructure and resources in response to a growing demand for space research and development. The permanent expansion of private commerce into low Earth orbit will be aided as the partners of the ISS commercialize infrastructure and support operations such as power supply and data handling. This trend is already under way with several commercial payloads having flown on the space shuttle and on the ISS.

The ISS is an unparalleled, international collaborative venture. In view of the global nature of the ISS, the international partners (sixteen countries) recognize the value of consulting on and coordinating approaches to commercial development. Each international partner retains the autonomy to operate its own commercial program aboard the ISS within the framework of existing international agreements, and mechanisms of cooperation are possible where desired.

see also Aging Studies (volume 1); Crystal Growth (volume 3); History of Humans in Space (volume 3); International Space Station (volume 3); Made with Space Technology (volume 1); Microgravity (volume 2); Mir (volume 3); Skylab (volume 3).

Lance Bush

Bibliography

"The International Space Station: Improving Life on Earth and in Space; The NASAResearch Plan: An Overview." Washington, DC: National Aeronautics and Space Administration, 1998.

Messerschmid, Ernst, and Reinhold Bertrand. Space Stations: Systems and Utilization. Berlin: Springer, 1999.