As it prepares to travel deeper into space in the next decade or so, NASA is urging private companies to leverage the investment it has made in low Earth orbit with the goal of commercializing this region of space near Earth.
Already astronauts aboard the International Space Station, an international crew of six people from the United States, Russia, Japan, and England, are doing research in microgravity for private companies like Merck, Novartis, and Procter & Gamble. But NASA says it wants to see this work expand broadly, and eventually, for commercial labs to operate in space independently of the ISS, a lab that NASA thinks it will be ready to leave by 2028.
"What I really hope is what we’re doing with these early commercial researchers, there will one day be way more than the ISS can handle,” Michael Read, who manages National Lab, an economic development program of the ISS, tells The Christian Science Monitor.
To read more, click here.