How does research on the International Space Station benefit life on Earth? Read the stories of innovative science in low-Earth orbit in a new book. More: https://www.nasa.gov/stationbenefits The International Space Station Program Science Forum (PSF) third edition of “International Space Station Benefits for Humanity” complies the benefits of research on an orbiting microgravity laboratory. The book provides examples of research accomplishments in areas of economic development of space, innovative technology, human health, Earth observations and disaster response, and global education. This latest edition includes new assessments of the economic value as well as greater detail than the previous version on the scientific value of research on the International Space Station. — NASA — Life Aboard the Space Station Source: NASA (https://images.nasa.gov/) Licence: Public domain (work of the U.S. federal government, 17 U.S.C. §105) Audio is served by the publisher; Budi does not host or modify it.
0:00One of the great powers of the International Space Station is its duration. The ability to do an experiment, take that knowledge, design a new experiment, follow on with that knowledge and then do the next generation after that. NASA's been launching vehicles for decades and each one of those vehicles has an experiment on them but never before have we had a laboratory totally dedicated to these kind of experiments. One of things that's most promising is that the scientific value and economic value that will come from the space station research is just starting to show up. The developments that we're making now are really setting the stage for this commercial market in space. The efforts that have led up to this through the performance of all these research investigations
0:48that we've already had on board, doing foundational research and testing out new technologies and Methods feed this market and feed the capability of doing future research in space and also in having new commercial entities operate in that space. We put together the ISS Benefits for Humanity book to really compile the stories that we knew of the amazing things that had been accomplished. The challenge with science is that it takes time, so even a new discovery that is clearly relevant to treating a medical condition could take decades for that treatment to actually come to market. And so we wanted to capture the state of those different new discoveries and how they were proceeding into benefits for
1:37humanity, but we also wanted to tell the stories of the people whose lives had already been changed. We've put in specialized sections to both economic value and scientific value in order to try and demonstrate to folks what sort The scientific valuations section, we were interested in just saying, hey, we have all these publications, the scientific publications that come from ISS. What should we do with them? How should we communicate why they're important? Yeah, we've got thousands of publications, but what does it mean? And how has it advanced science as a whole for Earth and also for spaceflight? So what was shocking to me is wow, look at all the publications that have come from space station research and other people in non-space disciplines are finding those publications and using them in their own research.
2:30And where you can integrate space research into everyday research on Earth, you know you're having the most impact on science. One thing we're adding is a lot more information about commercial development in low earth orbit that is leveraging the space station. The space economy today is still emerging, but its valuation has doubled in the last 10 years and there are more active participants in low-earth orbit than there have ever been. International Space Station has contributed to commercialization in a couple of different ways. First with commercial resupply, encouraging companies to develop their own capabilities and then those capabilities can be used not just by the International Space station.
3:14In terms of research, there are 12 commercial facilities that are operating right now And they've greatly expanded the kinds of research that can be accomplished on ISS and they're really bringing both new customers into the space market, but also they are allowing new entities to form that are learning the processes by which you conduct business in space. Commercialization is key to the further exploration mission that NASA has. We intend to use Space Station to help commercial entities enter the market in low Earth orbit. And we also expect them to be able to provide goods and services that someday will help us in our exploration mission beyond lower Earth orbit Scientists tend to ask, what's the next question?
4:06So the next questions for Space Station is what are we going to do next with this platform? This is the golden age of research We will likely never see such a strong microgravity science program in the future. We will have lots of human exploration, but to have a sustained laboratory in the way that we have now, now is the time. This research is feeding our exploration goals beyond low Earth orbit and developing the companies that hope to make low Earth Orbit part of their business plans. These two goals go hand-in-hand and the International Space Station is the way to get there. We really want to tell the stories of people and products and economic development, all of those things that are making the world a better place through our international cooperation
4:47on the space station.
This transcript was generated automatically from the recording, so it will contain mistakes — especially around names and places.