After three decades of service, the International Space Station is due to be retired in 2031 on a final journey in which it will burn fiercely in the atmosphere before plunging into the sea.
However, leaders in the space industry have proposed a way to save a collaboration that has received more than $100 billion (£80 billion) in funding.
Instead of a “death sentence”, the station should be preserved as a beacon of human inventiveness, according to Greg Autry, a senior space strategy adviser to President Trump and then the White House liaison for Nasa.
Now a visiting scholar at Imperial College London, the professor has been building a coalition of scientists across Nasa, the space agency, SpaceX, Elon Musk’s satellite and rocket company, and the wider sector who believe that“the station could be reinforced and boosted up to a higher orbit, where it is out of the high-traffic LEO [low Earth orbit] environment”.
To stay in its present orbit requires regular boosts, while the station also needs to swerve periodically to avoid debris. If it went higher, it would require less maintenance, Autry said.
The station should be transformed into a floating museum, 500 miles above the Earth and open to spacefarers across the globe, he said. “It could be an attraction for space tourists or even students on space field trips.”
With its pivot to the Moon, Nasa aims to focus its funding and spaceflight advances on an expanding lunar base.
Abandoning the space station would save about $1 billion a year. While a consensus is building on rescuing the observatory, the present global political collaboration behind the orbiting craft, which relies on Russia, is fragile.
Nasa unveiled an ISS Transition Report in January that plots the station’s demise, first through an infernolike atmospheric re-entry and then by smashing into an icy South Pacific.
Even as President Putin was amassing troops to attack Ukraine, Nasa proposed spending $200 million to commission Russian spacecraft to guide the space station to its watery grave.
However, Autry said it would destroy one of humanity’s towering achievements. “I have a better way to spend that [money],” he said. “I have long advocated not de-orbiting the station
but preserving it.”
“De-orbiting” was the most destructive option presented to the US Congress in 2018. William Gerstenmaier, Nasa’s long-time strategic director for the International Space Station, said
then that Nasa’s move away from control of the orbiter could be realised via myriad options, including “transitioning the operations of the ISS to private industry”.
However, Autry said “many of the ISS modules are likely to have structural life well into the 2030s”.
James Clay Moltz, dean of the Graduate School of International and Defense Studies at the Naval Postgraduate School in California, said that if the space station’s partners were to find
outfits willing to finance its post-Nasa future, “extending its life past 2031 is certainly possible”.
However, Moltz, a former adviser to the Senate, said that any “prospects for working with Russia . . . are off the table.
There is zero chance that the US Congress would approve the funding for Roscosmos [the Russian state space corporation].”
