The International Space Station (ISS) welcomes scientific guests, that is, experimental modules that have reserved berths in the ISS’s payload racks. In a sense, the ISS is a scientific cruise ship. It is extraordinarily exclusive even though the accommodations are plain, the provisions are sparse, and the attentions of the busy astronaut staff are, necessarily, fleeting.
The ISS can skimp on luxuries because it is the ultimate cruise to nowhere, circling the globe endlessly in near-zero gravity. Aboard the ISS, conditions prevail that laboratories on the Earth’s surface cannot match, conditions that give scientific guests the opportunity to generate unexpected and novel results.
To popularize ISS science cruises to the extent possible, the U.S. government inserted certain provisions into the NASA Authorization Act of 2005. One of these provisions calls for the American segment of the ISS to serve as a national laboratory with the goal of increasing its use by “other federal agencies and the private sector.” ISS partners besides NASA—the space agencies of Russia, Europe, Japan, and Canada—also promote scientific research on the ISS.
By the end of 2020, astronauts had run about 3,000 experiments on the ISS, more than 1,200 of which addressed questions in biology and biotechnology. “In microgravity,” NASA notes, “controls on the directionality and geometry of cell and tissue growth can be dramatically different to those on Earth.” By running life sciences experiments on the ISS, we may gain insights that lead to new therapies, medical devices, and manufacturing technologies.
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