Saving the iss
The Space Station is for sale! Will a private organisation save it from a watery grave?
FOR SALE: one space station. Five billion miles on the clock. One careful owner. Built and maintained regardless of expense. Would suit a variety of new uses. Buyer to collect from current location in low-Earth orbit.
You might not see this advertisement on an online auction anytime soon, but already there is a lot of discussion about what to do with the International Space Station (ISS) when it reaches the end of its life. The station has been built over a period of 20 years and a cost of around $150 billion, and there are plenty of people who feel that the current official plan to crash it into the ocean would be a scandalous waste.
Some propose simply extending the life of the ISS, continuing to add new modules and replacing any worn out parts into the foreseeable future. Space exploration certainly has a good history of successful mission extensions – from the Mars rovers to New Horizons, spacecraft that haven't actually broken down are routinely kept working long beyond their warranty period.
There is a difference with the ISS, though. It's a relatively low-cost thing to maintain ground crew and facilities on Earth for a distant robotic probe, but a very different matter indeed to maintain a human presence on an orbiting laboratory. Regular re-supply flights are essential, requiring humanrated spacecraft, extensive launch and recovery facilities, and a huge ground crew. Annual running costs are at least $1 billion per year.
Speculation over what to do with it was rife even before the platform was fully built. In July 2009 NASA announced its intention to scrap the
ISS by controlled de-orbit in the first quarter of
2016. Currently, the various international partners have committed to run the ISS until at least
2024, and most observers reckon that 2028 is the earliest realistic date for the end of the Space
Built after dozens of space flights over two decades, and costing $150 billion, are we really prepared to let the ISS simply crash back to Earth?
Station in its present form.
The official NASA plan, as the agency's public affairs spokesman Dan Huot explained, has the
ISS being scrapped, although "several partners and commercial companies are looking at potential options to use pieces of [the ISS] beyond its end of life. Those uses will shape up in the years to come."
Meanwhile, Russian space agency Roscosmos is already making plans to redeploy its ISS modules into a proposed new third-generation space station called Opsek (Orbital Piloted Assembly and Experiment Complex). This would be used to assemble large interplanetary spacecraft and act as a crew staging post for missions to the Moon and Red Planet Mars.
The European Space Agency (ESA), is open about the many possibilities that still exist. ESA has no official policy on what to do with the station, but its ISS programme manager Bernardo Patti told us that further mission extension remains a real possibility. "It's a massive investment which provides very good benefits and would be expensive to replace. In my view the ISS will probably remain until the end of the 2020s at least." Patti likens the argument to that of keeping an old car on the road. "Of course it would be nice to have the new model with the new gadgets, but the cost of that is so much more than a new part."
Operational costs have already come down, and will fall further. "We will never be complacent about safety, but we can be more efficient as our experience grows" says Mr Patti. This, combined with lower costs of access to low orbit via the many new spacecraft in development, could cut ISS running costs substantially.
Some of the more outlandish ideas to be circulated include repurposing the ISS as a kind of orbital hotel, or boosting it to a much higher orbit – perhaps even a transfer to a lunar orbit. However, space tourism seems unlikely to be enough to keep the ISS operational. It would require professional astronaut hosts, and the number of mega-rich people willing to pay the inevitably sky-high room rates must be limited. If the overall cost of the station to date is divided by the number of visits, it works out about $7.5 million per astronaut per day.
Each astronaut requires supplies amounting to 6kg per day, for food, hygiene, and other consumables. Each kilogram costs about $10,000 to loft to the station, so merely covering this basic
“The ISS will probably remain until the end of the 2020s at least”
Bernardo Patti
need would cost $60,000 per person per day.
How about redeploying ISS to a lunar orbit?
With recent discussion of a potential US/Russian collaboration for a new platform orbiting the Moon, as part of a renewed interest in human exploration beyond low-Earth orbit, could ISS simply be shunted up there and save everybody a lot of money?
Bernardo Patti says this isn’t impossible, merely just impractical. "This would be allowed by the laws of physics, and in practice would require electrical propulsion instead of chemical propellants. You could get there, slowly, but for what? It would be almost impossible to service, and a colossal logistical burden to sustain people there."
Far more likely is that there will not be a single answer to the question of what to do with the
ISS, but many. Some Russian components will be redeployed on the Opsek platform, while some older units may be scuttled into the Pacific. Canada and Japan both have a substantial orbital presence thanks to the ISS, and will be looking for ways to maximise return on their investments. NASA remain tight-lipped about these possibilities, telling us only that it "is not currently assessing moving the station to a new orbit."
However, NASA has already indicated that it sees private enterprise as the future for near-Earth space. William Gerstenmaier, the agency's chief of human spaceflight, said in 2015 that NASA was "going to get out of ISS as quickly as we can. Whether it gets filled in by the private sector or not, we’re moving out".
A sign of things to come is the installation of a private airlock scheduled for 2019. The Nanoracks unit will be the first permanent commercial module attached to ISS, but may not be the last. This new orbital real estate will open doors for the ISS in more ways than one.
It is a direction likely to gain approval from ESA. "We think we have to give a chance to private enterprise to try things like on-orbit manufacturing. There is a growing feeling that we have to see if the commercial operators can make a case for this, says Patti. "Maybe by the early 2020s, a consortium of companies could take advantage of what we have put there – a subsidised platform that gives them the chance to fly with their own wings."