No Sky-High Payoff Yet
When astronauts William Shepherd, Yuri Gidzenko and Sergei Krikalev opened the hatch to the International Space Station on Thursday, the orbiting habitat acquired its first long-term residents. What it needs now is a sustainable and meaningful purpose.
In 1984 President Ronald Reagan saw the station as a way of keeping up with the Soviets, who according to a congressional report were about to pull ahead of the United States in manned space exploration. That Cold War world is long gone, and with it much of the apparent need for a space station.
The station does play at least one legitimate role in the post-Cold War era: Because of the partnership with Russia, it employs missile scientists who might otherwise offer their services to the enemies of the United States. The space station, however, should be much more than a make-work project for Russian scientists. Its best chance of acquiring a larger purpose lies in the development of profitable zero-gravity technologies.
NASA has only recently begun to welcome private industry into the space station. According to a report by the auditing firm KPMG Peat Marwick that NASA commissioned, the space agency lacks “a proactive culture toward commercial and government collaboration.” That may change as the special zero-gravity conditions that space provides are increasingly sought out by established industries like manufacturing, which believes that conditions in space will help allow development of new metal alloys and semiconductor chips. Especially promising are zero-gravity forms of biotechnology. Already, biotechnology companies have conducted experiments in which space shuttle astronauts grew pure protein crystals that may one day help treat cancer, diabetes and immune disorders. Such experiments were limited by the short duration of space shuttle flights. That’s why companies like Viragen Inc., which hopes to use zero-gravity research to produce a natural interferon to fight human immune disorders, are now vying for a share of research time on the space station.
NASA’s challenge should be ensuring that taxpayers profit from any future applications of these technologies, but it is currently on the verge of selling taxpayers short.
In September, NASA Administrator Daniel S. Goldin announced that he had licensed the agency’s “bioreactor,” one of its most promising innovations to date, to a Maryland biotechnology firm for a mere $400,000 plus a 5% royalty on any profits made under the license. The deal also capped any royalties at $2 million a year. The bioreactor is a small drum that allows human cells to grow more freely than in earthbound petri dishes.
At a press conference announcing the bioreactor licensing, Goldin told reporters that the deal was more about unleashing the “driving energy” of an “entrepreneurial team” than about royalties. However, taxpayers bearing the eventual $96-billion cost of the station and directly subsidizing its research may not agree.
The space shuttle is already big enough to outshine most of the stars in the night sky. It is by all accounts a marvel of engineering. However, unless the federal government sees to it that the station is well used, its glint could become a billboard for taxpayer money misspent.
