The problem was that NASA didn't see a need for this, and there never was a strong commercial component to the proposal.
Space Industries Incorporated was a company formed in the 1980s for the purpose of building a privately owned space station, which was to be called the Industrial Space Facility (ISF). At the time, the idea of private development in space was a pioneering one.HistorySpace Industries was founded in Houston, Texas by Maxime Faget, who had recently retired as chief of engineering and operations at NASA, as well as entrepreneurs James Calaway, Guillermo Trotti, and Larry Bell. Their plan was to build a space station that would feed off the life support system of the space shuttle when it visited, but would not maintain continuous life support between shuttle visits. Faget proposed this plan because maintaining continuous life support would be cost prohibitive.Joe Allen, a physicist and astronaut, was a partner, as was Westinghouse Electric Corporation. Investors included Roy M. Huffington, an oilman and later United States ambassador to Austria; James Elkins, co-founder of the Vinson & Elkins law firm; and Walter Mischer, a developer.Calaway lobbied the United States government to be an anchor tenant in the proposed space station. In 1988, the Reagan Administration requested $700 million from the annual budget in order to participate in the project, but the request was not approved by Congress, and the space station was never built.The company eventually merged with Calspan Corporation, which in turn merged with General Dynamics Corporation.Industrial Space FacilityThe ISF was scheduled for launch in the early 1990s. It was to have 31 payload racks housing up to 11,000 kg (11 tons) of commercial industrial and microgravity manufacturing experiments. It was to have a pair of 140 mē (1500 sq. ft.) solar panels each producing 20 kW of power. Software was developed that used a learning heuristic algorithm in order to most efficiently use the ISF's resources.
I'd love to see some documents on this idea.
Let's start off with the Wikipedia entry first:Space Industries Incorporated was a company formed in the 1980s for the purpose of building a privately owned space station, which was to be called the Industrial Space Facility (ISF). At the time, the idea of private development in space was a pioneering one.HistorySpace Industries was founded in Houston, Texas by Maxime Faget, who had recently retired as chief of engineering and operations at NASA, as well as entrepreneurs James Calaway, Guillermo Trotti, and Larry Bell. Their plan was to build a space station that would feed off the life support system of the space shuttle when it visited, but would not maintain continuous life support between shuttle visits. Faget proposed this plan because maintaining continuous life support would be cost prohibitive.Joe Allen, a physicist and astronaut, was a partner, as was Westinghouse Electric Corporation. Investors included Roy M. Huffington, an oilman and later United States ambassador to Austria; James Elkins, co-founder of the Vinson & Elkins law firm; and Walter Mischer, a developer.Calaway lobbied the United States government to be an anchor tenant in the proposed space station. In 1988, the Reagan Administration requested $700 million from the annual budget in order to participate in the project, but the request was not approved by Congress, and the space station was never built.The company eventually merged with Calspan Corporation, which in turn merged with General Dynamics Corporation.
After the merger its hard to trace what division the this project was folded into. Its possible it was transferred into:1993 - Space Systems Division to Martin Marietta.
I worked at McDonnell Douglas during the period they were investigating the ISF for use with their electrophoresis drug processing project. I have some notes and presentations from the program if anyone ever is considering a history of this program.
Quote from: Seer on 01/11/2014 12:50 pmI'd love to see some documents on this idea.I've got a stack of them about two inches thick, mostly articles, but also some thick presentations. Way too much to scan. I think I got most of them out of the NASA HQ archives (currently temporarily closed for renovations), but there might also be stuff in NTRS and online. I don't know anything about corporate records and if anybody from the company kept anything. There might be some AIAA papers on this. I suspect that there is some good documentation in Richard Truly's NASA files (I don't know where they are, but they're probably stored at NARA or the Federal Records Center). There was a pretty good Air & Space magazine about ISF in the early 1990s that dealt with the company's travails. That might be online somewhere.I was originally going to write an article about ISF, but never got the required ambition.The ISF story was complicated and somewhat convoluted. I believe it originally started out as an entirely independent proposal. They planned on generating the vast majority of their revenue from non-government sources. But after awhile they realized that there just wasn't enough money for that, so they then decided that they would get NASA as an "anchor tenant" for a big chunk of their revenue. But they ran into some serious headwinds, because they were competing against space station and NASA didn't like that. NASA officials were concerned that if they endorsed ISF for micro-g research, Congress might ask why the space station was needed and cancel it. And NASA officials also didn't believe that ISF was really necessary if they got their space station. I think that relations got bitter and ISF never got the government funding necessary to really get going.If you think about this, you can start to see some real thorny problems with the concept, because this was going to be a private mini-station that was serviced by the shuttle. How much should the government charge per servicing mission? Early shuttle missions to service comsats had been very heavily subsidized, but by the late 1980s, post-Challenger, the White House wasn't going to allow that kind of thing. And you can imagine how NASA suddenly deciding to increase shuttle servicing prices by 15% due to new accounting rules or some such might wipe out the ISF business plan. There are in fact a lot of parallels between what happened with ISF and later commercialization efforts. The increasingly stormy relations between a company and NASA officials of course happened with MirCorp. And there have been lots of private companies that have started out thinking that they could simply capture part of "the market" only to later discover that they really needed the government to serve as an anchor tenant. ISF is a great case study.
Sounds a bit like Bigelow and his sovereign clients.
Quote from: Seer on 01/13/2014 07:23 pmSounds a bit like Bigelow and his sovereign clients.The "sovereign clients" transmogrified into NASA not only as anchor tenant, but only tenant.
Quote from: Danderman on 01/18/2014 03:46 pmQuote from: Seer on 01/13/2014 07:23 pmSounds a bit like Bigelow and his sovereign clients.The "sovereign clients" transmogrified into NASA not only as anchor tenant, but only tenant.Was ISF originally going after sovereign clients? I thought that their target market was actually private companies like pharmaceuticals. I should look through my stack of materials on ISF.
Thought that the only way to make money manufacturing/growing stuff in orbit is if you can sell it in orbit bringing anything back down would be way too costly .Only in orbit market is food for astronauts.Incidentally if you could soft land upper stages on the moon their tanks would be wort a fortune if a lunar base is set up.