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 suspended, 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 deprive future generations of access to 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 successive generations of the new millennium, Dordain told me in an interview.
After NASA placed a death sentence on the International Space Station, Dordain teamed up with his long-time friend and partner in the Station’s construction, former NASA Administrator Michael Griffin - at Griffin’s urging - 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 preserved for future admirers and apostles of its brilliant advances.
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“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 fate, the widely hailed Director General says.
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 a quarter-century ago, and NASA now aims to decommission and topple the $100-billion sky palace around the year 2030.
Yet 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 across a range of different approaches, 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 Starship rockets that will speed humans to the Moon and to Mars, to produce a specially designed spacecraft that would act as a Styx-like tugboat to guide the ISS to its demise.
NASA is paying Elon Musk’s SpaceX $843 million to perfect 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 savior rather than an assassin of the International Space Station.
Twin stars in the constellation of globally renowned aerospace engineers, Dordain and Griffin state in their clarion call to rescue 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 in what he calls “Free Space,” and on the Moon and Mars, 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 regarded as a primary shaper 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 letters calling on them to protect the ISS as a universally treasured artefact of the new Space Age.
“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 says in the appeal.
In the latest twist in the ISS odyssey, NASA’s leadership has signalled it might be open to lifting its death decree on the Station if opposition to its de-orbiting plan skyrockets across America and around the world.
When Jonathan O’Callaghan, a leading London-based space journalist, asked if there was even “a two percent chance” that the ISS could be pushed into a higher, sanctuary orbit in 2031, during a press conference the American space agency staged on July 17, one NASA official offered a laser-thin glimmer of hope.
Ken Bowersox, associate administrator for NASA’s Space Operations Mission Directorate, told O’Callaghan that at NASA, “We constantly revisit decisions that we’ve made in the past,” and that this process of continuous review is likely to be applied ahead to the ISS “end of life” question.
A former Space Shuttle pilot and commander of an expedition to the ISS, Bowersox might be, like Mike Griffin, part of a contingent of NASA’s one-time astronauts and aerospace engineering wizards who back giving the Station a second life by sending it into an Elysian orbit.
Meanwhile, Tumlinson, a highly regarded expert on the booming “commercial spaceflight revolution,” and on the American and Russian space stations that have taken flight over the past half-century, says that if his “Save Our Station” movement is victorious, and triggers a Congressional reprieve for the ISS, that 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, computer vision, precision boosters and an AI-directed 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 across the globe, sprinkled across the independent space stations in orbit, and to the SpaceX explorers despatched to build the first domed cities on Mars and begin terraforming the planet.
