The effort will be "extremely challenging," concedes Mark Uhran, the NASA official in the life and microgravity sciences office who has been working on the idea for more than a year.
"The first thing we want to do is to get these two reports into the public domain, and get feedback from the private sector," he said.
The first report, requested by Uhran's office a year ago, is being drafted by an NRC panel chaired by Cornelius Pings, the president emeritus of the Association of American Universities. That nearly completed report will urge NASA to set up an organization which will give the research community more clout, says Pings.
One model, say other panel members, is the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, which supports Hubble Space Telescope research through a contract with NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. The study may call for the organization to be up and running by 2002 so that planning can begin on the first significant round of station experiments.
The internal NASA study will make no specific recommendations, but it will outline six ways to go about setting up an independent organization.
According to a presentation Uhran made to a NASA panel in June, "various forms are conceivable," ranging from an institute like the one in Baltimore to a government corporation like Comsat to a consortium of academic institutions like the University Consortium for Atmospheric Research. NASA's experience with non-governmental organizations, he notes are "very positive."
The Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., for example, is a federally funded research and development center. The lab is owned by NASA but operated by the California Institute of Technology, which has its campus a short drive away.
NASA has also experimented more recently with other forms, such as the National Space Biomedical Research Institute, which is the result of a cooperative agreement among several universities, and NASA, with headquarters at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston as well as the Astrobiology Institute at NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, Calif., a "virtual" institute which will tie together researchers at a half-dozen different campuses across the country.
Uhran's idea is to develop an organization that can serve the station's many users, from a university scientist focusing on basic research, to a pharmaceutical researcher intent on finding a cheaper way to make a drug. And he has backing from his superiors.
"I believe some sort of institute would be very helpful," wrote Arnauld Nicogossian, NASA life and microgravity sciences chief, in a Nov. 13, 1998 letter to the NRC's space studies board requesting a panel to investigate the matter.
The board has a long history of needling NASA on the need to focus more on station research. A 1994 report complained about "inadequate resources devoted to, or distraction of management attention from, use of the space station for scientific research." Because of budget shortfalls, the agency in recent years has repeatedly moved money set aside for the construction of scientific facilities into the budget for station construction, sparking an outcry from angry scientists.
Though the details remain secret, NRC panel members say their report will call for an organization which helps guide researchers through the dizzying bureaucracy necessary to do work in space, to provide experimenters with access to NASA facilities for pre-launch testing, as well as to provide at least some financial assistance. The panel also may call for NASA to assign astronauts to work exclusively on experiments.
Johnson Space Center in Houston has primary responsibility for building and operating the space station, and panel members said officials in Houston will likely look askance at the NRC panel's recommendations. But John-David Bartoe, who manages station research for the center, insists that NASA officials understand that the agency needs new procedures to streamline the time and effort involved in getting researchers' experiments into space and back.
Though panel members add that NASA Administrator Daniel Goldin supports the institute idea, severe resistance from Johnson could make it difficult for supporters. Some forms of institution, such as a government corporation, would require congressional legislation. This could easily be blocked by the Texas delegation, which has close ties to Johnson officials.
A less ambitious approach, like the Space Telescope Science Institute (STCI), seems more viable option. STCI has a contract with Goddard, and while it is integral to organizing the Hubble research effort, the NASA center has final say over all aspects of the telescope's operation.
Meanwhile, the private sector is moving ahead with or without NASA. Uhran insists that the new entity, however it is structured, would include basic and applied research as well as technology development and more product-driven work on the U.S. portion of the station.
Meanwhile, Washington-based Spacehab announced December 10 that it will work with Russia's Moscow-based Energia to build and manage a commercial research and broadcast module, called Enterprise, that will be attached to the Russian end of the station.
"That's a very interesting twist to this whole debate," says one researcher involved in the NRC effort.
Spacehab officials have worked for the past few years to help researchers navigate the NASA bureaucracy, like putting experiments aboard space shuttle lockers. It is unclear what role, if any, a new institute would play in the Enterprise scheme -- especially since the module would be located in the Russian portion of the station and would not be subjected to direct NASA control.
NASA officials declined to comment on what the Spacehab-Energia deal could mean for a new institute. But both NASA officials and NRC panel members say they want the agency to begin work organizing the institute as soon as possible, given the many hurdles it faces.
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