NASA slow to build private research, funding prospects

WASHINGTON -- Commercial research aboard NASA's manned space vehicles has produced better car parts, a new perfume and disease-free seed potatoes, but the effort to recruit fresh business and attract more private money has stagnated.

NASA got roughly $48.1 million from industry members and "research partner centers" in its Space Product Development Program in 2001, the most recent figures available. It drew about $48.6 million from those sources in 1997.

"This type of research is in its infancy. We've had a few small successes," said Lance Bush, NASA's International Space Station commercial development manager. "It's going to take awhile for us to have the large successes to increase the research to a greater degree."

The commercial partnerships amount to less than 1 percent of NASA's human space flight funding, which includes the shuttle program and the International Space Station, Bush said. That budget totaled approximately $5.5 billion in 2001 and $5.4 billion in 1997.

The product development program counts dozens of industry partners, including automakers and biotechnology, electronics and pharmaceutical companies.

The perfume was a pleasant surprise. A rose sent up in a shuttle landed with a new scent, and Shiseido Cosmetics developed a fragrance incorporating it. Other successes include advances in medicine, water purification and the manufacture of automotive parts.

"The thing people don't realize is how much this impacts their daily life," said Bob Britt, president of Quantum Tubers Corp. of Delavan, Wis., which has worked with NASA to develop disease-free seed potatoes in space.

"A potato as a seed is a dirty thing," Britt said. But with NASA help, the company is breaking the cycle of disease "so we're starting out with zero-pathogen tubers."

Costly, often risky

Still, others say that as cutting-edge as space research can be, it's costly and often risky.

Dawn Sienicki, executive director of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce's Space Enterprise Council, said that with the weak economy, many companies are putting such experiments on hold.

"It's very expensive to go to space. It is not always reliable. You don't know when you might launch, you don't know if something will happen to your project on orbit," Sienicki said. "So until we have cheaper and more reliable access to space, we cannot realize the true commercial potential that space possesses, in particular the International Space Station."

The business lobby plans to pay close attention to congressional hearings on the space program in the wake of the Columbia disaster. It wants Congress to provide more money and speed development of a post-shuttle space vehicle.

Even some of the companies NASA promotes in its product development literature as success stories do not see it as a crucial component of their research.

For example, while Ford Motor Co. used the program to improve engine component production, NASA's work is one small part of Ford's research, and the automaker does not work with the agency on a regular basis, company spokesman Todd Nissen said.

Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, R-Calif., chairman of the House Science Committee's space panel, said a stable space-based lab system and financial incentives are needed to realize space's commercial research potential.

Rohrabacher wants Congress to provide a 25-year tax break to those who engage in commercial activity in space. Even that would be little help, however, without a cheaper, more reliable space vehicle than the shuttle, he said.

"Our first goal has to be to lower the cost of getting into space or it will never be a viable place to do business or research. The cost of every shuttle flight is about $500 million a flight," Rohrabacher said. "That's a heck of a lot of overhead for someone to pay to do a week's worth of research in space."

Baltimore-based StelSys paid roughly $225,000 for an astronaut's research time as part of development of liver disease treatments, said Lori Garver, a former NASA associate administrator for policy and a past StelSys consultant.

StelSys chief executive Paul Silber said that because the project -- creating a device to sustain people with severely injured livers -- is a high-profile one using NASA technology, the company has not faced the long wait for a spot on a shuttle and the space station that many others have.

Bristol-Myers Squibb has joined with NASA and another company to conduct antigravity experiments looking at the growth of antibiotics in space. The initial data was encouraging, but there was a power loss with one experiment bound for the space station, and the company is not pursuing the venture, spokesman Brian Henry said.

General Motors has no plans to lobby on the space program, but is interested in the outcome of the congressional review. It has benefited from space research into ceramics and aluminum materials, and is interested in NASA research into a purer combustion engine, spokesman Michael Morrissey said.

"Some of the stuff is so distant that it's not necessarily even in our planning," he said. "They can do 10 experiments that fail and then hit the one that is a real breakthrough in technology."

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On the Net

NASA Space Product Development Program: spd.nasa.gov