An American plan to destroy the International Space Station by propelling it to burn through the atmosphere, and then crashing it into the Pacific Ocean, would rob citizens of the future of one of civilization’s greatest technological masterworks, and should be halted, say one-time leaders of NASA and of the European Space Agency.
NASA’s draft blueprints to send the ISS on a peacetime kamikaze mission, to explode on impact with Antarctic waters, would obliterate a pole star of human ingenuity, says Jean-Jacques Dordain, Director General of the European Space Agency when the ISS was being built and expanded.
The decision to raze the Station should be reversed, and the ISS should instead be boosted upward, into a higher orbit, as a gift to succeeding generations of the new millennium, Dordain told me in an interview.
Dordain says he was so alarmed by the prospect of a death sentence being placed on the International Space Station that he teamed up with his long-time friend and partner in the Station’s construction, former NASA Administrator Michael Griffin, to issue a worldwide appeal for a reprieve.
The twin titans of the ISS project jointly penned a missive – aimed at the five space agencies that are allies on the Station, and at the billions of global citizens who would lose an irreplaceable treasure house of technology – calling for the floating space base to be given a second life that could stretch out for centuries.
“As two among many builders of ISS,” Dordain told me, “we recommend to those in charge to consider other options than destroying” one of the planet’s greatest achievements.
The ISS master builders are calling instead for “transferring it to future generations and leaving them to decide” the Station’s long-term fate, the widely hailed Director General told me.
NASA sketched out its scheme to despatch the ISS to a deep-sea underworld in a new White Paper, which calls for a “de-orbit vehicle” to speed the Station through a mortal plunge to Earth, with both spacecraft ending their lives in a remote sector of the icy seas.
The Space Station allies began assembling the ISS in 1998, and NASA now aims to decommission and topple the $100-billion sky palace around the year 2030.
But NASA’s long-time strategic director for the ISS, William Gerstenmaier, testified before Congress that the agency’s relinquishing control of the Station could be realized in many different ways, including by handing over operations to the rapidly expanding commercial space sector.
Many of the ISS modules, he told the Senate Subcommittee on Space, are likely to have “structural life” well beyond 2030.
After overseeing the construction of the ISS while at NASA, Gerstenmaier is now a co-leader at the independent space superpower SpaceX, and would prove invaluable in any project to transform the Station into a fantastical orbital museum.
Ironically, NASA has selected SpaceX, creator of a revolution in next-generation reusable rockets, to design the spacecraft that would act as a Styx-like tugboat to guide the ISS to its demise.
NASA’s paying SpaceX $843 million to produce the ISS terminator craft, which will have a super-short lifespan. “Along with the space station,” NASA’s leaders reveal in a press release, the doomed SpaceX booster “is expected to destructively break up as part of the re-entry process.”
But supreme space architects Dordain and Griffin are proposing an alternative mission for this special operation SpaceX spacecraft: becoming a saviour rather than an assassin for the International Space Station.
Twin stars in the constellation of globally renowned aerospace engineers, Dordain and Griffin state in their worldwide appeal on rescuing the Space Station that the very same booster that NASA is commissioning to destroy the ISS could instead power its ascent to a higher heaven, where it could safely circle the planet for centuries.
“To move the ISS from its present 400-kilometer altitude to an 800-kilometer altitude circular orbit requires a boost of about 220 meters per second, about the same as required for precise de-orbit control,” they explain in an open letter, published via SpaceNews, to colleagues, friends and allies scattered across the space partners that co-constructed the orbital outpost.
“Our question to the current generation is: since the boost stage must be built anyway, would it not be better to use that stage to place the ISS in a higher orbit for the possible use of a future generation than to destroy it upon reentry?”
Space exploration activist Rick Tumlinson hails the new transatlantic alliance between the European and American space agency legends to create a new future for the International Space Station.
Tumlinson, who has long advocated for human settlements on Mars, and then across other planets, via his EarthLight Foundation, told me in an interview that defenders of the ISS now have to take their case to the other Station allies and enlist the spacefarers who have been transformed by their missions aboard the outpost.
“I would also suggest that the astronauts and cosmonauts who served aboard her [the ISS] would unite in this cause,” he says.
“In fact, why not invite Russia to work with us in this effort on behalf of the legacy of both nations?” After that, he adds, he aims to reach out to the Japanese and Canadian space agencies to help block the plan to jettison the ISS.
“I see this battle as a turning point in shifting from the throw-it-away culture of the past to a new space economy that is circular, providing a model for the Earth’s people,” he says. “At a time when the next generation is focused on saving the planet, the idea that the agency held by so many as the harbinger of the future would want to bomb it by trashing one of the most important buildings in human history is absurd.”
Across North America and Europe, Tumlinson is widely regarded as one of the primary shapers of the exploding NewSpace sector, where the dynamic designers of independent rockets or space outposts are rapidly changing the trajectory of human spaceflight. His venture capital outfit SpaceFund has channelled investments into some of the rising stars of NewSpace, ranging from SpaceX, inventor of the first potential Trans-Mars Express, Starship, to the builders of future space stations Axiom and Voyager.
At the same time, Tumlinson says potential supporters of the ISS across the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives have to be made aware that the booster technology to rescue the Station could quickly be perfected, that leading lights across the space sector are backing this Save Our Station, or SOS, mission, and that acolytes of aerospace advances across the continents are likely to coalesce around the project.
Even as the U.S. Congress starts reviewing the NASA Reauthorization Act of 2024, which touches on the roadmap to destroy the Station, Tumlinson has begun blasting Members of Congress with a petition to shield the ISS as a universally treasured artefact.
“I am part of a growing number of citizens and space leaders, including members of both parties and independents, who view the ISS as a major achievement and are deeply concerned about the potential and tragic decision to de-orbit and destroy it.”
“We propose using a NASA-contracted ‘space tug’ or other means to move this historic structure to a storage orbit and declare the U.S. portion of the station (originally known as “Freedom”) a national heritage site.”
“I can assure you this issue, while not yet on the national radar, will soon become so,” he predicts in the appeal.
Tumlinson, a highly regarded expert on the “commercial spaceflight revolution” who has already been called to testify before Congress half a dozen times, says a legislative reprieve for the ISS could create the foundation for the next stage of the Station’s life in orbit.
A future generation of space acolytes “could resurrect the ISS, bring it back to life,” he predicts.
After modernizing the outpost, with enhanced life support and power systems and an AI-powered collision avoidance system, the International Space Station could once again host scientists and astronauts, and double as a museum-spaceport.
This rebirth of the ISS might be broadcast live, Tumlinson says, to admirers spread out around the globe, sprinkled across the independent space stations in orbit, and to the SpaceX explorers despatched to build the first domed city on Mars and begin terraforming the planet.
