Description: This Phase I study will design a flight qualified NanoRacks III Facility that is similar to the conventional NanoRacks facilities currently on the ISS but with increased power, cooling and real-time data downlink/uplink capability that will increase the capacity of on-orbit testing and analysis thus reducing or eliminating sample return to Earth. A NanoRacks III Facility will allow on-orbit testing and flight qualification (elevation of TRL to 7 and higher) of critical space hardware systems and biological research hardware which will enable crew to conduct experimentation, data collection and change implementation on-orbit with guidance from ground researchers. NanoRacks, LLC proposes to design and prepare for fabrication the NanoRacks III facility which can be transported on any carrier (e.g. Progress, Dragon, HTV, etc.) to the ISS, installed in an ISS ExPRESS Rack and utilized with an ISS ExPRESS Rack computer. The Phase I study will design the NanoRacks III Facility to support the Phase II construction and flight of the NanoRacks III Facility.

Benefits: Non-NASA applications include space flight hardware qualification studies as well as biological, pharmaceutical, and materials science commercial space research applications. In particular, commercial customers have approached NanoRacks to fly higher power electronics testing facilities to provide TRL raising services at low cost. This NanoRacks III Facility system combined with the NanoRacks commercial space operations model will provide commercial researchers with easy, regular, low cost, and standardized access to the ISS U.S. National Laboratory research facility. The easy to use NanoRacks III Facility will provide conventional research techniques in space to more traditional researchers.

A flight qualified NanoRacks III Facility will be able to perform the following studies on-orbit using standardized format MegaCubeLab enclosures: higher power (~50 watts) TRL testing of spacecraft components for the NASA FAST program, higher power biological facility experiments (e.g. thermoelectric cooled biological payloads, biological incubators, etc.), higher power materials science experiments (e.g. micro furnace, laser furnace, etc.). These studies will support new microgravity biological and materials science research areas never before available on-orbit. Capabilities like this will be critical especially with the end of the shuttle program, when the amount of returned mass, no matter the hardware available, will require we move more and more towards a system of on-orbit analysis