When the space shuttle Discovery lifts off for the International Space Station next month, a small commercial payload called a NanoRack, tucked into its middeck cargo space, could be a harbinger of how the U.S. hopes to do business in space in the years to come.

Discovery’s crew will take a few minutes during the busy mission to transfer the Express Rack locker insert carrying the NanoRack into the ISS. Later, a station crewmember will plug it into an open Express Rack slot in Japan’s Kibo laboratory module.

Inside the NanoRack will be a few pathfinder experiments designed to characterize its working environment for future paying customers. If all goes as planned, the privately funded device eventually could generate payouts of more than $800,000, four or five times a year, for NanoRacks LLC, the company that developed it and set up the Space Act agreement with NASA that allows the payloads to fly on the station.

That agreement was signed last September, as top officials at the U.S. space agency and the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy were developing the dramatic attempt to jump-start a commercial space industry embodied in NASA’s Fiscal 2011 budget request (AW&ST Feb. 8, p. 20). The NanoRacks agreement is the first under an open call for commercial uses of the ISS national lab, says Jason Crusan, chief technologist for the Space Operations Mission Directorate at NASA headquarters. The call extends through 2014, reflecting earlier NASA plans to stop funding the ISS after 2015. Those plans have since been extended to 2020.

“We awarded them the Space Act agreement to help them build this precursor hardware and get on orbit to demonstrate commercial capabilities on the ISS,” says Crusan.

The NanoRacks partnership—the Kentucky Space consortium, the University of Kentucky, Morehead (Ky.) State University and Belcan Corp.—worked with experts at Johnson Space Center to flight-qualify the NanoRack platform and find a place for it on the ISS.

“At this stage we, the founding partners, have self-financed this,” says Jeff Manber, a longtime commercial-space advocate who helped set up NanoRacks. “We are doing so solely because we have the optimal, stable policy in terms of the space station that allows the private sector to commit its own resources.”

The basic NanoRack concept builds on CubeSats—10-cm. (4-in.) cubes typically built by engineering students as learning tools and launched piggyback on whatever spacecraft or launch vehicle is available. The NanoRack itself is a fixture with spaces to plug in 16 experiments that meet the CubeSat form factor via a standard USB port, which links them to the ISS power and data grid and requires minimal input from the flight crew (see photo, p. 37).

Commercial customers will pay $50,000, plus a negotiated “maintenance fee” to put hardware weighing as much as a kilogram (2.2 lb.) in one of the spaces. Educational payloads will fly for half that amount. NanoRacks hopes to change them out 3-5 times a year, using the shuttle for its remaining four flights and then shifting to Russia’s Progress, Europe’s Automated Transfer Vehicle, Japan’s H-II Transfer Vehicle and—eventually—the commercial transport vehicles envisioned in NASA’s new approach.

The service will include 5 volts of power and data delivery to Earth, if required. Customers can buy as many of the spaces as they need, and develop their own hardware to occupy them. The cost of other services, such as additional power, can be negotiated.