Congress Can Save The Space Station

The International Space Station “is the crown jewel of human spaceflight for all humanity,” says a leading space scholar, a timeless treasure of stellar engineering that absolutely must be protected into the far future. (Photo by NASA/Space Frontiers/Getty Images)

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While NASA’s ancien régime imposed a death sentence on the International Space Station, the orbital outpost, an unparalleled beacon of human invention, can still be saved by the space agency’s new wunderkind leader and by the strongest advocates of the ISS across Congress, say leading American space scholars.

If space activists begin pressing representatives across both houses of Congress to push for a reversal of this sentence, that could tip the balance in favor of legislators mandating sending the Station into an orbital oasis, says Madhu Thangavelu, a co-leader of the powerful National Space Society.

A changing of the guard at NASA, with the billionaire space pilot Jared Isaacman confirmed by a supermajority in the Senate as the agency’s new administrator, could open the way for NASA to lift its decree for the Space Station to burn through a fiery atmospheric reentry, and then smash into the Antarctic seas, five years from now, Professor Thangavelu told me in an interview.

Isaacman, a remarkable Good Samaritan who commanded two sensational orbital flights to help raise $250 million for the St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, personally contributing half of that total, is also a space philanthropist who has offered to finance and pilot an independent mission to boost the Hubble Space Telescope, which is now in danger of falling back to Earth, into a safer orbital ring.

Leading lights across the space sector, and around the world, are calling for the ISS to likewise be propelled into a sanctuary orbit, protected as a super-icon of the globe’s unfolding space civilization for citizens of the future.

There are already signs Congress is moving in this direction, with new legislation introduced by Representative George Whitesides of California asking NASA to conduct a feasibility study on moving the Station into a high-altitude haven.

NASA’s former leadership commissioned SpaceX to develop a terminator spacecraft that would, like a modern-day Styx ferry, force the ISS into a post-life underworld.

Yet Thangavelu told me that NASA’s new-generation torchbearers could reverse that verdict, ordering SpaceX to develop a booster that would act as a savior rather than an assassin of the ISS, sending the Station into the higher heavens.

An appeal jointly issued by the onetime directors of the European Space Agency and of NASA, who together oversaw the building of the Station a generation ago, urged NASA to launch an ISS rescue operation, a goal that has gained supporters worldwide.

Their open letter, aimed at the five space agency partners on the ISS, NASA’s current leaders, and the countless admirers of the outpost scattered across the continents, called for the $150-billion super-spacecraft to be protected as a celestial shrine to spaceflight.

“The International Space Station is the largest, most complex and most important element of space infrastructure yet deployed, and one of the most incredible engineering accomplishments in human history,” they pointed out in their appeal.

“We believe that destroying it would be a pointless loss for the future.”

These twin global titans in aerospace engineering added that “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.”

In this sanctuary orbit, they added, the ISS could circle the planet for generations.

Jean-Jacques Dordain, ESA’s Director General when the International Space Station was being assembled, told me in an earlier interview that rather than being crashed into the seas, the Space Station should be guided upward, as a gift to spacefarers of times ahead.

While NASA originally ordered SpaceX to develop a spacecraft that would push the ISS to its deep-sea dénouement, Director General Dordain told me that the very same booster could instead be used to give the Station a new life, lifting it above the atmospheric drag that is now pulling the outpost back toward Earth.

“The push needed to dunk it into the ocean (risky business, this!) is about the same as it is to propel this huge complex ISS, lock, stock and barrel, into a safe orbit for future generations to visit and appreciate,” says Thangavelu.

But space exploration activists across the United States need to move quickly to persuade Capitol Hill to legislate a new future for the ISS, he says.

“This is the time for advocates and citizen groups to light the fire under Congress by writing or phone calls…we need to steer them.”

“As a director of the National Space Society,” he adds, “I am continually in discussion with our leadership to save the ISS.”

“We have an annual ‘March Storm’ coming, when we directly go to Congress to voice our thoughts,” in a flurry of face-to-face meetings with the most influential Congressional backers of the overarching space program, and of shaping NASA’s future master plans, Thangavelu tells me.

“This ISS issue,” he adds, “is also resonating in the other citizen advocacy groups like the Planetary Society and the Moon Village Association.”

Thangavelu, who also heads a futuristic space architecture studio at the University of Southern California, told me the International Space Station could ultimately become the centerpiece in his envisioned International Space Museum, a fantastical floating citadel to showcase breakthroughs in spaceflight that could expand for centuries into the future.

Conceptual designer of space stations, Moon habitats and other extraterrestrial outposts, Professor Thangavelu says this celestial museum could host other outstanding icons in aerospace design that mark the rise of the globe’s first spacefaring culture and development of a multi-planetary civilization.

Meanwhile, he says the new ISS bill proposed by Congressman Whitesides, a onetime director at the National Space Society, and a Chief of Staff at NASA, could provide the perfect springboard for a renewed citizens and scholars’ campaign to craft an alternate future for the International Space Station.

“It is the sense of Congress that the ISS is one of the most complex engineering achievements of all time,” Whitesides states in the bill.

The unique character and value of the Station, he adds, warrants NASA conducting “an engineering analysis to evaluate the technical, operational, and logistical viability of transferring the ISS to a safe orbital harbor … after the end of the operational low Earth orbit lifetime of the ISS to preserve the ISS for potential future reuse.”

The bill was unanimously approved by the House of Representatives Science, Space, and Technology Committee, just the first stage in the process of it being passed by both houses of Congress.

Space exploration visionary Rick Tumlinson told me in an interview that he is ramping up his “Save Our Station,” or SOS, campaign in response to the new Congressional overture on changing the fate of the Station.

“The bill introduced by Congressman George Whitesides to make NASA look at alternatives to de-orbiting the ISS is exactly the right move for what I would call the New American Space Agenda,” says Tumlinson, who has long advocated for human settlements that spread out across the solar system, and then beyond, via his EarthLight Foundation.

Condemning the Space Station to an explosive exit, poisoning the atmosphere and the Antarctic seas in the process, he adds, “is exactly the wrong signal to send to the generation about to take command of our government.”

“The old use-it-and-throw-it-away culture of the past is over, and the current NASA plan is tone-deaf to this emerging reality.”

Tumlinson says he has been liaising with astronauts once stationed on the ISS, along with inventors of the new independent space stations set to take flight after the ISS is decommissioned, to collectively press Congress to force NASA to abandon its scheme to destroy the iconic orbiting lab.

Across the U.S. and Europe, Tumlinson is regarded as a primary shaper of the exploding NewSpace sector, where the dynamic designers of independent rockets and space outposts are rapidly changing the trajectory of human spaceflight.

His angel investor outfit SpaceFund has channelled funds into some of the rising stars of NewSpace, ranging from SpaceX, inventor of the first potential Mars Express, Starship, to the builders of future space stations Axiom and Voyager.

He says leaders across the Senate and House of Representatives have to be briefed that a booster capable of steering the ISS to a new, almost eternal orbital ring can be perfected before the Station begins its second life above the Earth.

“Moving the space station to a high storage orbit for future generations does several positive things at once:

• It signals we are moving out onto the frontier to stay.
• It averts a possible catastrophe should things go wrong on the way down.
• It is symbolic of a new recycling/re-use culture arising in space.
• It saves NASA from itself – and a disastrous PR move – just when we are about to open the frontier.”

“I urge anyone in this field or beyond who honors what was done in this historic [orbiting] building, and/or believes we are going out there to stay, to reach out to their representatives and support this bill,” Tumlinson says.“If you are a NASA fan, do it to save their history.”

In his newest book, Why Space?: The Purpose of People, Tumlinson says the co-building of the International Space Station by a coalition of space powers represents one of the titanic leaps in the global co-creation of a space civilization.

In the process, he adds, humanity is reinventing itself, and its future expansion across the cosmos.

Professor Thangavelu agrees: “The ISS is the crown jewel of human spaceflight for all humanity,” a timeless treasure of stellar engineering that absolutely must be protected into the far future.