One of the world’s leading storytellers on the International Space Station’s near-mythical birth and life in the heavens says the ISS should be saved for explorers of the future.
The Station should be elevated into a sanctuary orbit in recognition of its role as a heroic icon of the Space Age, says Roger Launius, NASA’s onetime Chief Historian.
“I’d love for the ISS to be saved,” Launius told me in an interview, so that its epic space adventure can be extended across a new era.
NASA’s current leaders have decreed that the Station suffer a dual-stage death – first by burning through the atmosphere and then by exploding on impact with the Antarctic seas – six years from now.
But that judgment should be overturned, according to a constellation of leading lights surrounding NASA.
“It’s a noble cause,” Launius says, to instead propel the Station into a higher haven, allowing it to circle the globe through times ahead.
As NASA’s most illustrious scribe, Launius charted the creation of the International Space Station in the starry skies as the new millennium approached, and then covered its rocket-speed evolution as astronauts around the world sojourned at the celestial outpost – like demigods observing the ever-changing Earth.
He left his mission at NASA only to take up an even dreamier, starry-eyed post – at the globe’s greatest citadel on the wonders of space flight and technology – the National Air and Space Museum, at the coveted epicentre of Washington DC.
All the while, Launius has produced a Big Bang-like explosion of books and articles on the ISS and humanity’s alternative futures in the cosmos, with stellar manuscripts like Space Stations: Base Camps to the Stars.
Dreams of constructing space stations, revolving around the globe, and the real-life assembling of these orbital beacons by astronauts and robots, have transformed the human race. These floating lighthouses – especially the ISS – have morphed into super-icons for a rapidly globalizing culture, he observes in the book.
Fantastical flying stations first came to life in the futuristic imaginings of writers and rocketeers around the world, and took form with the colossal ringed outpost designed by spaceflight wunderkind Wernher von Braun – immortalized in the mesmerizing masterpiece 2001: A Space Odyssey,” he says.
Von Braun, who sketched out his rotating station in a series of spellbinding magazine articles that would ultimately lead to the creation of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and even chart its trajectory of missions for decades to come, watched his envisioned spacecraft animate filmgoers across the continents with the release of Space Odyssey, which “set a high mark for depicting a wheel-like space station on the von Braun model,” Launius writes in his own masterpiece epic. “Kubrick depicted a human race moving outward into the solar system, and the station served fundamentally as base camp to the stars.”
Space Odyssey’s incredibly prescient previews of space shuttles speeding explorers to the Station, and independent spacecraft operators converging on the spinning spaceport, would all propel the building of the International Space Station, and its centripetal attraction for a flotilla of spaceships launched by a circle of space powers.
“One hundred years hence, humans may well look back on the building of the station as the first truly international endeavor among peaceful nations.” The multi-nation coalition that co-constructed the ISS – Americans and Russians, Japanese and Europeans – Launius adds, set out to “revitalize the spacefaring dream,” and might have set the stage for human explorers to begin terraforming other worlds.
In a coda to the book that he scripted a decade ago, 2001: A Space Odyssey – Beyond 2001, he says he was mesmerised by 2001’s “complex, sometimes surreal story,” and transfixed by “the film’s message of human evolution and its possible relationship to extraterrestrial intelligence.”
“Its message of humankind’s destiny to explore the universe still rings true for me today,” he says.
Yet in passages written before Russia’s revanchist regime began resurrecting threats of nuclear warfare against the Western democracies – upending life on Earth and in orbit – Launius remarked on how completely the world had been transformed since the superpower skirmishes that surrounded Space Odyssey’s release in the 1960s.
“The Cold War that was so much a part of the subtext of the film is gone,” he wrote, “and along with it the sense of humanity teetering on the brink of self-destruction through nuclear annihilation.”
In fact, he pointed out, the onetime archenemies had joined forces to map out and assemble the International Space Station – a scenario that 2001’s director and screenwriter could scarcely have imagined as the race to perfect ever-more-powerful hydrogen warheads played out from Moscow to Washington.
Kubrick and his scriptwriter Arthur Clarke, and then Roger Launius, all reshaped the two and a half millennia-old Greek epic The Odyssey to create their masterworks, but Kubrick was more of an oracle, remarkably divining the future of human spaceflight advances.
In contrast, Launius recast The Odyssey with the International Space Station in the central role, becoming a New Age Homer to recount the Station’s peregrinations and perils in the new millennium.
Like the protagonist in the original Greek Odyssey, the ISS now has to avert its fated death on the high seas.
Despite NASA’s current plans to crash the ISS into half-frozen seas around the year 2030, “The historian in me says preserve it,” Launius says. “I would love for that to happen.”
Blowback to NASA’s “deorbit” strategy has been swift across the U.S. and Europe. The onetime directors of the European Space Agency and of NASA who co-led the construction of the Station are now calling for it to be protected as an unparalleled treasure house of technology – a masterwork of human civilization that could be boosted above the high-traffic zone of low Earth orbit that it now flies through.
Jean-Jacques Dordain, ESA’s Director General when the ISS was being built, and his American counterpart, former NASA Administrator Michael Griffin, co-wrote a worldwide appeal calling for a new future for the ISS.
The twin aerospace titans pointed out that the very same booster that NASA is commissioning to destroy the Station could instead power its ascent to a higher trajectory, becoming a saviour rather than an assassin for the space icon.
“If you can take the same booster to send the ISS to a higher orbit that would be cool,” Launius told me.
One of the world’s top space scribes, with a passion for the breakthroughs in space technologies that are reshaping human civilization, Launius says he “would also love the see the Hubble Space Telescope be brought back to Earth to save it, and displayed in the National Air and Space Museum in DC.”
Aerodynamic drag is slowly lowering the Hubble Telescope’s altitude, yet so far NASA has not presented any plan to rescue it from a fiery atmospheric reentry.
This lack of a rescue mission is extraordinary given that NASA itself has lauded the Hubble Telescope as “one of NASA’s most transformative observatories” – one that “has changed humanity’s understanding of the universe.”
