For sale: condo, great view, management on premises, can be used for business or retail space, price negotiable. An ad like that might draw a rush of buyers in New York or San Francisco, but NASA is finding out that it's not exactly a seller's market when it comes to hawking room on the international space station (ISS).

At NASA's Habitation Module Commercialization Conference this summer, the space agency floated the possibility that one or more commercial partners would own and maintain the crew habitation module-essentially the living quarters-on the space station. NASA would lease space. While the government has previously leased privately owned assets on communications satellites, there has never been corporate ownership on manned space vehicles. However, the ISS is likely to be different. In fact, the Canadian Space Agency has already turned over allotted experimental space on the station to an American company, SPACEHAB.