Mark Uhran is Director, Mission Integration and Space Product Development in the Office of Biological and Physical Research at NASA Headquarters in Washington, DC. He is spearheading NASA's campaign to involve industry and academia in space-based research.

[Ed. note: At press time, Mark Uhran had just been named to the position of Senior Systems Integration Manager for the International Space Station.]

NASA Tech Briefs: How does the Space Product Development Division operate?
Mark Uhran: Space Product Development consists of about 15 commercial space centers. Each Center is established through a cooperative agreement issued by NASA to a host university. The agency provides a base grant of about $500,000 to $1 million per year. Then, based on the type of research they'll do and where they are, the universities enlist industrial partners to perform that research. All in all, we have over 150 industrial affiliates and about 60 product lines.

NTB: How are industry affiliates brought in?
Uhran: They're contacted by the universities, which basically act as a liaison between NASA and private industry. The universities educate industry in the potential competitive advantages of the ultra-vacuum microgravity afforded by space. They work with industry to demonstrate its physical advantages, as well as in the design and conduct of experiments to provide empirical evidence of those advantages. The work being done is largely in the biological, chemical, and physical sciences. We've had substantial progress with biomedical and agricultural research in microgravity.

NTB: What type of experiments have been conducted?
Uhran: Well, I'll have to pick and choose just to give you some idea of the scope of our program. We've been working with The Center for Biophysical Engineering at the University of Alabama. The objective of that program is to identify molecules of significance, principally in medical applications, and understand the molecular structure of those molecules. Then, they design drugs that interact with that structure in a beneficial manner.

What they're working on is macromolecular crystallography -- and they’ve been flying macromolecules for almost 15 years now. They're very excited about the Space Station era, because one of their major constraints has been the duration on-orbit.

These protein, nucleic-acid-type molecules take a long time to grow in microgravity, but we do find that in many cases the structures lend themselves to 400 percent higher-resolution x-ray diffraction analysis.

Another program, The BioServe Center at the University of Colorado, has a number of projects with Bristol-Meyers Squibb to understand antibiotic production rates in space. They've found -- at least anecdotally -- results that indicate the production rates could be 10 times higher in a microgravity environment.

Now, they're not looking to produce antibodies in space. What they're looking to do is understand what the underlying dynamics are, so they can increase the yield in ground-based processes.

One gene research center is heavily involved in agriculture. A center at the University of Wisconsin that's working on gene transfer and gene expression in important crop species, such as soy beans. Once again, we see a factor of 10 increase in the rate of gene expression, on account of the microgravity.

NTB: And in non-biological areas?

Two centers specialize in engineering, at Texas A&M University -- The Center for Space Power and The Commercial Space Center for Engineering. They tend to interface with large, medium, and small aerospace companies in the pursuit of topics such as laser optic communications, high resolution imagery, thermal-energy management testbeds, power distribution, power storage -- virtually any spacecraft subsystem that's undergoing experimentation to establish next-generation spacecraft technology.

Two more are The Consortium for Materials Development in Space, at the University of Alabama, and hosts and The Center for Commercial Applications of Combustion in Space, at the Colorado School of Mines.

NTB: On which spacecraft do the experiments take place?
Uhran: Research up until this point has been shuttle-based. The International Space Station, however, will afford much greater opportunities for the research -- in fact, we have experiments on orbit right now.

NTB: Are these projects intended only for the ISS?
Uhran: The research up until this point has been Shuttle-based. But the Space Station is going to afford much greater opportunities for research -- we have experiments on orbit right now.

But it's clearly premature to jump to the conclusion that these projects are certainly going to evolve and bring economic returns in the near term. These are programs that show us what I call a glimpse into the future.

Mark Uhran can be reached at muhran@hq.nasa.gov.
For more information on Space Commercialization, go to commercial.nasa.gov.

Previous "Who's Who at NASA" interviews:

February 2003
Thomas Alderete
Chief, Simulation Planning Office
Flight Simulation Laboratories, Ames Research Center

January 2003
Tom DeLay
Composites Engineer
Materials, Processes, and Manufacturing Dept., Marshall Space Flight Center

December 2002
Lee Norbraten
Manager
Space Shuttle Program Development Office, Johnson Space Center

November 2002
Sean O’Keefe
NASA Administrator

October 2002
Dr. Meyya Meyyappan
Director, Center for Nanotechnology, Ames Research Center