CAPE CANAVERAL - The European Space Agency has sold its first ride to the International Space Station.
A German company, Intospace, signed the contract Wednesday at the ISS Forum 2001 in Berlin. The company provides technical support and scientific marketing in the microgravity research.
Intospace will sell the space on the station to another buyer, said Achim Bachem, who sits on the executive board of DLR, the German space agency.
The German space agency is one of 10 countries in the European Space Agency that are participating in space station Alpha.
NASA already has flown three commercial experiments on the space station, but this is the first commercial deal for the Europeans.
Europe's contribution to the station includes the Columbus laboratory, cargo ships and science experiment racks.
In addition to sitting in on the latest discussions of space commercialization, participants in the three-day conference also got to converse with the station's current residents, Yury Usachev, Jim Voss and Susan Helms, on Wednesday.
Helms told them that the crew tries to spend about 15 to 20 percent of its time working with the scientific cargo.
"It's a great pleasure to tell you that things are happening earlier then a lot of people expected," Helms said.
Bachem said that the United States has pledged to host the next international conference, which probably won't happen for two years.
"Having the mixture of scientific and commercial users here was excellent, especially people who want to sell multimedia usage," Bachem said. "They need the science on the station in order to sell the multimedia capacity."
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