Backdropped by the blackness of space and Earth's horizon, the International Space Station moves away from the Space Shuttle Atlantis in this digital photograph taken by an Atlantis crew member June 19, 2007. (Xinhua/Reuters Photo)

    BEIJING, June 26 (Xinhuanet) -- NASA may share room on the International Space Station after its construction is complete in 2010 with outsiders free for research experiments, media reported Tuesday.

    "We didn't need the entire capacity of the space station to do exploration-related research," said Mark Uhran, NASA's assistant associate administrator of the space station. "So the capacity that was freed up after we restructured our program is now available to other agencies or private sector companies."

    The space agency expects to use its part of the station to prepare for long-duration stays on the moon and to develop the technology to send humans to Mars. The rest would be made available to U.S. researchers.

    NASA is in talks with several government agencies, most notably the National Institutes of Health, and private businesses that want to conduct research in the microgravity laboratory orbiting 220 miles above the Earth.

    The scheme, which is still in development, grew out of Congressional requests for NASA to consider operating the station as a National Laboratory after its construction is complete in 2010.

    NASA's plans to open up the space station to outsiders, though, depend on whether private companies build spaceships that could travel to the outpost as a replacement for the grounded shuttles after 2010. NASA has given 500 million dollars in seed money to two private companies to build spacecraft and has signed agreements with others.

    (Agencies)