Government officials on both sides of the Atlantic are optimistic that private industry will pay to use the space station for its own research projects. And a generous portion of onboard resources — laboratory space, electrical power, crew time, and the like — has been set aside for this purpose; now all that is needed is customers.

European station resources reserved for industrial use are expected to amount to between 20 and 30 per cent. The US reserve will be between 30 and 40 per cent — compared with 30 percent each for basic life science and microgravity research. NASA chief Dan Goldin would like to see this proportion climb eventually to 60 per cent.

German research minister Jürgen Rüttgers goes one better than Goldin — he would like commercial users to pay as much as possible for the station. And Claude Allègre, the French research minister who has complained loudly about the costs of station use, would be happy to see no government-funded basic research at all, letting industry take all the laboratory space.

This kind of talk may warm the heart of politicians who hope the private sector will help foot the station's enormous bill. But it frightens government-funded academic researchers, who expect to be rudely bumped whenever a paying customer comes along.

Perhaps they have no need to worry. Despite years of government efforts to enlist commercial partners, industry has so far shown little interest in spending real money on space experiments. NASA alone has spent about $40 million a year for the past decade trying to prime the pump of private space investment primarily through a network of Commercial Space Centers (CSC) affiliated with universities or private companies, which offer free rides into space for CSC-sponsored research.

As of last year, NASA could claim some 150 private US firms as partners in this commercial space network. But their investments have mostly been limited to small, in-kind payments, such as donating a researcher's time and laboratory facilities, or contributing a few tissue samples or crystals to be launched into orbit.

Growth area? Space-grown crystals (B) offer research insights, but space ‘factories’ may be a long way off. Credit: NASA

Some projects flown on the space shuttle by ‘name’ companies like Merck and Genentech have been “advertising, let's face it”, says one senior NASA science official. In an advisory committee meeting last year, Edward Gabris, who oversees commercial payloads for NASA's office of microgravity and life sciences, admitted that “nobody beats a path to my door” to send privately funded experiments into orbit.

Hartmut Ripken, director of space station activities at the German space agency DLR, says European industry's lack of interest is understandable, given the past lack of flight opportunities on the space shuttle, and the inadequate facilities for industrial research on Mir. The space station will be different, he believes, and will draw private sector interest once the research results start coming back.

The bad news for would-be space entrepreneurs is that any commercial operation in orbit has to compete with far cheaper ground-based alternatives. Commercial protein crystal growth (PCG) in space is often touted as a likely money-maker. Crystals tend to grow larger in microgravity, yielding more suitable material for X-ray diffraction analysis.

Pharmaceutical companies will pay good money for such crystals, say advocates of PCG, because it will help them design more effective drugs. But even on the ground, protein structure analysis is no longer a preferred method of drug design, which currently focuses more on high-throughput testing of candidates generated through combinatorial chemistry and gene libraries.

“Commercial payloads are getting far more space than is justified,” complains one materials scientist, who questions whether a space manufacturing boom will ever materialize when the cost of reaching orbit is so high. He quips: “If Rumpelstiltskin took straw into space and spun it into gold, he'd still lose money.”