The European Space Agency (ESA) has partnered with Kayser Italia to offer the Kubik facility on the International Space Station (ISS) to commercial customers. Kayser Italia is a Small Medium Enterprise (SME) private independent aerospace system engineering company. Their core business relies on the exploitation of space platforms including the ISS, satellites, sounding rockets, stratosphere balloons, by developing instruments for space research and applications. They are one of the main organizations researching microgravity.
The collaboration of the ESA and Kayser provides the new Bioreactor Express Service (BES) to allow users to carry out experiment in zero gravity. The BES is a service intended to establish an “express” way to carry out scientific and/or technological experiments on board the ISS. It exploits the KUBIK incubator facility of ESA. Commercial customers can utilize existing experiment containers, customize existing containers to meet their needs or design an entirely new container to match their needs. The starting price is around two hundred thousand dollars. This price covers the flight using an existing experiment container from conception to launch and return of scientific data within a year.
Kubik has been running experiments for the ESA’s SciSpace program since 2004 in the European Columbus modules that is part of the ISS. The tiny laboratory is only sixteen inches across but is has room for twenty-four experiment containers and is equipped with features such as temperature control. It also includes a centrifuge that simulates a range of gravity levels by spinning the containers. These features together allow for comparison between different environments. One example is to investigate how samples of bacteria, plant seeds or human cells behave in gravity levels of Earth, Mars and the Moon.
David Zolesi works at Kayser Italia. He says that “with Bioreactor Express Service, we want to make Kubik accessible to everyone, providing an end-to-end service from concept to implementation, for a reasonable price and within an acceptable time-frame.”
The BES was developed within the ESA’s commercial partnership initiative of new commercial services and application using the unique conditions that exist in space.
The first experiment that flew as part of the BES was the BioAsteroid project developed by the University of Edinburgh. The project investigated how gravity affects the interaction between microbes and rock in reduced gravity. Two bio-mining reactors allowed researcher to examine how the microbes develop a biofilm on the surface of a rock sample. Biofilms are collections of microbes that grow on a surface. One example of a biofilm is dental plaque. This experiment flew in October of 2020. The goal of the project was to investigate whether or not microbes could be cultivated to help mine resources in space. Bio-mining has great potential on Earth. In space exploration bio-mining could be used to recover economically useful elements from asteroid rock. It might also be useful in creating fertile soil from lunar dust.
The BioAsteroid experiment has been concluded on the ISS. The samples are awaiting getting space on one of the DragonX supply shuttles to be returned to Earth for analysis.