If useful work were being done there, they would be fighting applicants off with a stick.

They are begging for people to find uses for that white elephant.

NASA Seeks Outside ISS Users (Subscription Required)
NASA Seeks Outside ISS Users
Aviation Week & Space Technology
07/02/2007, page 24

Frank Morring, Jr.
Washington

Half of U.S. rack space on station unfilled; NASA seeks outside users

Printed headline: Space Available

NASA is giving away half of its space on the International Space Station. The question is whether anyone will be able to get there to use it.

As the ISS enters the final stretch of its buildout to completion before the space shuttle fleet is retired in 2010, NASA managers are offering the use of roughly 11 refrigerator-sized experiment racks inside the station’s pressurized modules, and perhaps four external sites, free of charge. The catch is that users will have to get their experiments to the ISS at their own expense.

“We’re not going to require users of the station to pay a fee for access to the laboratories,” says Mark Uhran, assistant associate administrator for ISS in NASA’s Space Operations Mission Directorate. “What we expect the new entities to cover is the cost of their own research, the cost of the payload devices. We’re still working the challenges with the transportation costs because obviously we don’t know precisely what those transportation costs are going to be.”

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