I'm talking with Nanoracks about putting small flying robots in a sealed section of the ISS and letting people rent time to control them. Students or other people using the service would be able to either upload instructions for a drone to execute (turn 90 degrees then accelerate, etc) or try to manually pilot it (I'm told that there is about a 500-1000 millisecond lag, which might make that difficult). They would get live streaming video back, possibly from multiple angles and be able to share the video of their time (as well as stuff like graphs of their motion using position tracking, etc).
One of the great unknowns of the project is how much interest there would be and what sort of price would be reasonable. I'm currently thinking of trying to charge $50 per 10 minute slot with a single drone (sharing space with other drones), with free/open source access to a computer simulation of the platform so that you can plan what you want to do. I think it might be something people would want to do because it would be useful in teaching newtonian mechanics, plus the wow factor of actually making something happen on the ISS.
If I may ask, do you think that price sounds reasonable for what you would be able to do? Do you think that is something you or your class would be interested in trying out?
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