Last week, SpaceX made history as the first commercial entity to successfully shuttle astronauts from Earth to the International Space Station. While that feat alone is impressive and opens countless doors to future space travel, those at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama are excited for a different reason—more astronauts on the ISS means more science.
The ISS is one of the most advanced laboratories ever created. Floating 240 miles above Earth in microgravity, experiments on the ISS are carefully crafted and executed. It’s the team at Marshall that schedules, assists with, and coordinates all the experiments on the ISS. For the past 20 years, between two and six humans live and work aboard the space station. With the recent SpaceX launch, however, that has changed.
“A few years ago, we started getting ready for the additional crew because we knew commercial crew was coming. We started putting into place different concepts as far as making sure we had the right amount of people working real-time to support the additional operations,” said Chris Wakefield, a payload operations manager in the Payload Operations Integration Center at Marshall.
The SpaceX Crew Dragon Resilience brought three NASA astronauts and one Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) astronaut to the ISS—upping the total to seven. That number of astronauts effectively doubled the amount of science that can be performed in one week.
About 40 to 50 hours of science can be performed each week during missions with three crew members. Now, with a seven-astronaut crew, NASA expects scientific working hours to increase to 80 to 100 hours per week.
At any given moment on the ISS, about 200 experiments are being worked remotely from the ground and by the orbiting crew. Resources, such as crew time and the availability of work stations where the experiments are setup and operated, are carefully managed to ensure each investigation is operated safely and properly—and that the maximum amount of science is returned.
In addition to remote work, the team at Marshall helps resolve any issues that may arise as an astronaut is working on an experiment. The relationship between ground scientist and air scientist is already well established as collaboration begins as soon as an experiment is selected to fly on an expedition.
“We have the real-time control team that is following along with the operations every day,” Wakefield explained. “They’re dealing with those issues that come up when something is not working quite right or a payload developer sees something unusual, like an unexpected result from their science. Sometimes you have changes that have to be made on-the-fly.”
On Dec. 2, 2020, SpaceX will launch additional research and technology to the ISS in an upgraded version of the company’s Dragon cargo spacecraft designed to carry more science payloads to and from the flying laboratory. The mission’s experiments focus on health, wellness and disease for those on Earth as well as those in space.
Using 3D engineered heart tissues, astronauts will investigate how changes in gravity affect cardiovascular cells at the cellular and tissue level. The results could provide a new understanding of heart problems on Earth, help identify new treatments and support development of screening measures to predict cardiovascular risk prior to spaceflight.
The astronauts will also test the ability of a commercially available device to provide quick and accurate counts of total and differentiated white blood cells in microgravity. Doctors commonly use the total number of white blood cells and counts of the five different types of white blood cells to diagnose illnesses and monitor a variety of heath conditions on Earth. Verification of an autonomous capability for blood analysis on the space station is an important step toward meeting the health care needs of crew members on future missions.
Another experiment will observe the response of brain organoids to microgravity. Small living masses of cells that interact and grow, organoids can survive for months, providing a model for understanding how cells and tissues adapt to environmental changes. Data on organoids-in-space can help scientists understand how microgravity affects survival, metabolism and features of brain cells, including rudimentary cognitive function.
A scientific hardware update will also launch on the capsule. The Nanoracks Bishop Airlock is a commercial platform that can better support a variety of scientific work on the ISS, including the launch of multiple types of payloads. Roughly 5x larger than the airlock on the Japanese Experiment Module currently in use on the station, the Bishop Airlock allows robotic movement of more and larger packages to the exterior of the space station, including hardware to support spacewalks.
Photo: Brain organoids being prepared to fly to the space station for the Space Tango-Human Brain Organoids investigation. Credit: UC San Diego/Erik Jepsen