- Grants help fund costs for flight to International Space Station
Boston. 06 November 2017. Boeing and the Center for the Advancement of Science in Space (CASIS) have again joined forces to promote the use of the International Space Station (ISS) as an orbiting laboratory capable of producing cutting-edge research across numerous scientific disciplines. The two organizations on Nov. 2 granted a total of $500,000 to three microgravity research companies through startup accelerator MassChallenge™.
The awards to Cellino Biotech, Guardion Technologies, and MakerHealth mark Boeing and CASIS’s fourth year of collaboration on the “Technology in Space” prize at MassChallenge Boston.
CASIS is the nonprofit organization responsible for managing and promoting research onboard the ISS U.S. National Laboratory. Boeing is the ISS prime contractor, responsible for designing, building and processing the American modules and the integrated truss system that powers the station, for sustaining engineering, and for processing experiment and systems racks for launch, installation and operation.
The grants will provide seed funding for the three awarded companies and assist with hardware costs for flight to the ISS National Lab. With this latest collaboration, Boeing and CASIS have jointly partnered to fund 11 separate innovative startups through MassChallenge. The second round of these awarded investigations, Biorasis and Launchpad Medical, is scheduled to launch to the ISS National Laboratory in early December.
This year’s winning projects had to incorporate science or technology initiatives that would effectively use and benefit from ISS National Lab capabilities. CASIS will continue to work with additional MassChallenge “Technology in Space” proposers to build on their ideas and potentially transform them into flight-ready projects.
