First known patents filed from International Space Station research
Two companies have filed the first known patents based on manufacturing techniques and research conducted on the International Space Station (ISS), NASA announced yesterday.
According to the US space agency, microgravity 3D printer engineering company Made in Space and consumer goods company Procter & Gamble (P&G) filed patents at the US Patent and Trademark Office.
The four patents, which are based on experiments made aboard the ISS, relate to the manufacturing of specific materials and supplies in space. P&G filed three of the patents, with Made in Space being responsible for the fourth.
It comes amid a growth in experiments being performed in space.
NASA stated that over 2,600 experiments have been performed aboard the ISS, which was first launched in 1998.
“The number of experiments performed on the station has increased greatly in recent years, with NASA noting that several of the last crew expeditions have completed 300 or more experiments per increment,” claimed NASA.
A large sum of the funding for experiments in space comes from the Center for the Advancement of Science in Space (CASIS), a US government-funded national laboratory.
At a NASA advisory council earlier this week, director of the ISS, Sam Scimemi, said that the space station is able to reduce experimentation time compared to ground-based research.
Whereas companies on the ground could spend 10 to 15 years going from hypothesis to patent application, Scimemi said, P&G and Made in Space were able to make that transition in “just a few short years” aboard the ISS.
While these represent the first known patent applications based on ISS research, NASA said that others may have been made.
“The disconnect stems from CASIS having to rely on its partners to self-report such patent applications, with P&G and Made in Space being the first to do so,” explained NASA.
As a result, there could be other patents for space-based manufacturing either pending or approved that are unknown because the companies have not self-reported them to CASIS.
The agency added that the ISS National Lab, through CASIS, has granted more than $40 million towards experiments performed in “low Earth orbit”.
Around 50% of that funding goes towards implementation partners, whose responsibility it is to build the hardware the experiments are performed in.
Meanwhile, NASA said that another $143 million worth of experiments has been donated by third parties outside of NASA and CASIS. Organisations such as the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health have contributed towards this sum.
The figures only cover the cost of the experiments themselves, not the cost of launching the experiments up to the ISS.
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