of a new program inviting research on crewed Dragon missions. The company started quietly inviting proposals “for exceptional science and research ideas that will enable life in space and on other planets,” to be executed on orbit using its Dragon spacecraft capsule. Specifically, SpaceX says it’s looking for research studies and experiments focused on fitness, or solutions to increase “efficiency and effectiveness,” and those focused on human health during long-duration spaceflight missions. Selected research study groups would have access to SpaceX’s crewed Dragon missions, opening up a whole new use case for one of the company’s core products. The company has discussed using Dragon as an orbital lab, similar to the International Space Station (ISS), going back a decade. Evidently, the business case didn’t make sense until recently. But by platforming on orbit research, the company would also gain access to valuable data in addition to any fees or other conditions presented to customers. In the research collaboration terms and conditions, SpaceX states that it and the entity behind the scientific research will “jointly own” rights to all data recorded and samples obtained during the course of the research on orbit — regardless of whether this information was captured by SpaceX itself or the research institution. The document further specifies that all “technology” — which is expansively defined to include software, inventions, proprietary information and more — developed jointly by SpaceX and the research institution shall be jointly owned. The agreement also states that the technology would be jointly owned “without accounting to the other parties,” legal language that means that each party could essentially commercialize or license the technology without any duty or obligation to the other party. “Each party can license to anybody else, [though] they can’t give an exclusive license to anyone else, because they don’t have exclusive rights themselves,” Steven Wood, an attorney specializing in space law at Vela Wood, explained in a recent interview. “They can independently commercialize, and they have no duty or obligation to share any of the proceeds with the other party.” Techcrunch event