Understanding Socio-Technical Issues Affecting the Current Microgravity Research Marketplace The MIT Faculty has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters. Citation Joseph, Christine and Danielle Wood. "Understanding Socio- Technical Issues Affecting the Current Microgravity Research Marketplace." 2019 IEEE Aerospace Conference, March 2019, Big Sky, Montana, USA, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, June 2019. © 2019 IEEE As Published http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/aero.2019.8742202 Publisher Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Version Author's final manuscript Citable link https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/131219 Terms of Use Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike Detailed Terms http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/ Understanding Socio-Technical Issues Affecting the Current Microgravity Research Marketplace Christine Joseph Danielle Wood Massachusetts Institute of Technology Massachusetts Institute of Technology 77 Massachusetts Ave 77 Massachusetts Ave Cambridge, MA 02139 Cambridge, MA 02139
[email protected] [email protected] Abstract— For decades, the International Space Station (ISS) 1. INTRODUCTION has operated as a bastion of international cooperation and a unique testbed for microgravity research. Beyond enabling For anyone who is a teenager in October 2019, the insights into human physiology in space, the ISS has served as a International Space Station has been in operation and hosted microgravity platform for numerous science experiments. In humans for the entirety of that person’s life. The platform has recent years, private industry has also been affiliating with hosted a diverse spectrum of microgravity, human space NASA and international partners to offer transportation, exploration, technology demonstration, and education related logistics management, and payload demands.