Barbara Selby
Headquarters, Washington, D.C.                                    
December 11, 1991
(Phone:  703/557-5609)
 
Rick Mould
University of Alabama-Huntsville
(Phone:  205/895-6414)
 
Valerie Cassanto
ITA, Exton, Pa.
(Phone:  215/363-8343)
 
RELEASE:  91-203
 
AGREEMENTS PROVIDE COMMERCIAL ACCESS TO SPACE
 
   A recent agreement between NASA's Office of Commercial 
Programs and the University of Alabama, Huntsville (UAH), will 
provide additional flight research opportunities on the Space 
Shuttle for the space agency's 17 Centers for the Commercial 
Development of Space (CCDS).

   In support of this initiative, Instrumentation Technology 
Associates, Inc. (ITA), Exton, Pa., has signed a commercial 
agreement with UAH to provide the university's Consortium for 
Materials Development in Space CCDS, with flight hardware 
which will be flown on five Shuttle missions.  Under the 
agreement, Materials Dispersion Apparatus (MDA) Minilabs, 
developed by ITA, will be flown aboard the Shuttle.

   The ITA-UAH arrangement is a "value exchange" by which the 
MDA apparatus will be flown in exchange for a designated 
amount of MDA capacity provided to NASA's CCDS researchers.  
The agreement is for a 5-year period or until the five flight 
activities are completed, whichever comes first.  The first 
flight of experiment hardware, known as Commercial MDA ITA 
Experiments (CMIX), is anticipated for the fall of 1992.

   The UAH CMDS will manage the program for the CCDS 
experiments.  ITA will commercially market its portion of the 
MDA to both domestic and international customers.  For the 
first two flights of the hardware, 50 percent of ITA's portion 
of the MDA capacity will be reserved for U.S. customers.  
After the second flight, market demands will determine U.S. 
customer usage.
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   The MDA Minilab is a brick-sized autonomous materials 
processing in space device that has the capability to bring 
into contact and/or mix as many as 100 different samples of 
multiple fluids and/or solids at precisely timed intervals.

   The MDA was developed by ITA as a commercial space 
infrastructure element and as such is in support of the 
Administration's and NASA's Commercial Development of Space 
initiatives.  Financed with support from private sector 
resources over the past 5 years, the MDA hardware provides 
generic turnkey space experiment equipment for users who want 
to conduct science in the microgravity environment of space.  
The company performs all of the integration and documentation 
thus freeing the user to concentrate on the experiment. 

   The MDA hardware made two development flights this year on 
Shuttle missions STS-37 and STS-43 as part of CCDS-sponsored 
flight activity, performing biomedical, manufacturing 
processes and fluid sciences experiments.  Biomedical research 
using the MDA has included efforts to grow high quality 
protein crystals of enzymes associated with arthritis, cancer 
and AIDS which potentially could lead to the development of 
new drugs to inhibit these diseases. 

   "The CMIX flight program is an example of our evolution in 
flight hardware capability," said ITA's President John M. 
Cassanto.  "This will be a true test of the U.S. commercial 
materials processing in space market.  We look forward to a 
successful commercial venture because of the MDA's capability 
to provide high quality data at low cost per data point."

                            -end-