Commercial Service Provider Pathway

A Guide to R&D on the ISS through Business-to-Business Agreements with Commercial Service Providers (CSPs)

Welcome to the Commercial Service ProviderImplementation Partners that own and operate commercial facilities for the support of research on the ISS or are developing future facilities. (CSP) information page. This page explains the “fast track” for getting your payload to the ISSInternational Space Station.

The ISS National Lab has developed a pathway to support R&D on the ISS through business-to-business agreements to ignite the LEO(Abbreviation: LEO) The orbit around the Earth that extends up to an altitude of 2,000 km (1,200 miles) from Earth’s surface. The International Space Station’s orbit is in LEO, at an altitude of approximately 250 miles. economy. This pathway provides the same access to ISS resources available under the ISS National Lab solicitation pathway (upmass, crew time, etc.) but does not provide funding. Researchers that have funding available to cover their investigation costs and mission, integration, and operations costs related to a flight experiment can utilize the CSP pathway. Researchers can use the ISS National Lab Research Facilities Directory to identify the most appropriate ISS hardware and CSP(s) to support their investigation. Contact information for each CSP is available in the CSP directory. The ISS National Lab is available at info@issnationallab.org to answer any questions you may have regarding the directory.

What is a CSP?

CSPs are a subset of Implementation Partners that own and operate commercial research facilities on the ISS, conduct their own business development, and have a proven track record of successfully flying payloads to the ISS. CSPs have unique agreements with the ISS National Lab that allow them to bypass the traditional peer-review process and fly payloads to the ISS for their customers through business-to-business transactions. This pathway can reduce the time to approval from six or more months to as little as two weeks. To identify and contact CSPs, refer to the CSP directory.

How to Conduct R&D on the ISS through a CSP

Offerors interested in flying a payload to the ISS through a CSP must contact CSPs directly. Each CSP manages its own customer engagement and proposal process. CSPs will work with offerors to identify experiment requirements and develop quotes for services. Upon agreeing to terms, the CSP and the offeror will work together to complete an ISS National Lab Resource Request Form (RRFThe abbreviation for Resource Request Form. RRFs are submitted to CASIS by Commercial Service Providers to request use ISS National Lab resources (launch and crew time allocation) to provide customers with access to their commercial research facilities on the space station.), which will then be submitted by the CSP to the ISS National Lab. No funding is available from the ISS National Lab to support R&D through business-to-business transactions with CSPs. The offeror must be able to fund their own internal project costs and the cost of the CSP. The flow chart below gives an overview of the CSP RRF formulation, submission, and review process.

Once an RRF is approved by the ISS National Lab, the flight experiment will follow the standard payload integration process. The offeror and the CSP will work together through payload integration, launch, in-orbit operations, and payload return (if applicable). The ISS National Lab will provide support in the form of resources to execute the flight experiment, launch viewing opportunities, and public affairs support.

The ISS National Lab Payload Operations team (Ops@ISSNationalLab.org) is available to answer additional questions.

Learn from Past Investigations

To explore prior research conducted on the ISS, visit NASA’s Space Station Research Explorer and NASA’s Space Station Research Xplorer (SSRX) mobile app.

We thank you for your interest in conducting research leveraging the ISS National Lab. For general questions, contact us at info@ISSNationalLab.org.