THE INTERNATIONAL SPACE STATION FREE

The competitors say they can head off delays and deliver on price. “We have the history and the experience.” “There’s nothing that’s going to prevent the technology from being there for the hardware that flies,” says Doug Cooke, a former associate administrator at NASA who was heavily involved in planning the ISS. An inflatable storage compartment, called BEAM, has been docked to the ISS since 2016. That’s an excellent way to fit more cabin space in the payload fairing of a rocket-but even that idea is decades old. Some sections are visibly larger and more bulbous because they’d be folded up for launch and inflated in orbit. Most of these components already exist or are well along in development. They’d go in the opposite direction from SpaceX their approach is not to get too ambitious.Ĭonceptually, their designs borrow heavily from the ISS, with cylindrical modules and photovoltaic panels docked together. The competitors for NASA’s support say they can meet the challenge. What is that? $50 million-that’s the same price people are paying per seat to go to the International Space Station right now.” “They’re going to pull this off,” says Anderson. Starship has already been picked as NASA’s next moon lander. He wonders if SpaceX, which has been silent about its plans, might swoop in with its giant, reusable multipurpose Starship-launching laboratories and space factories, carrying tourists, doing almost everything a permanent space station could at a cost other contenders cannot match. What’s more, new stations “might be obsolete before they’re even launched,” says Chad Anderson, a venture capitalist whose firm, Space Capital, has funded companies including Nanoracks. And President Ronald Reagan originally proposed a space station by 1994 for $8 billion, but the ISS wasn’t finished until 2011 for more than $100 billion. went nine years between the retirement of the space shuttles and the first SpaceX crew launch. It said that without a working station, “the nascent low Earth orbit commercial space economy would likely collapse, causing cascading impacts to commercial space transportation capabilities, in-space manufacturing, and microgravity research.” “In our judgment, even if early design maturation is achieved in 2025-a challenging prospect in itself-a commercial platform is not likely to be ready until well after 2030,” the OIG said in an audit report. “If the ISS is extended to 2030, this will ensure that we don’t have a gap in our access to low Earth orbit,” said Philip McAlister, NASA’s director of commercial spaceflight.īut the race to avoid that gap may have already been lost-and if that warning seems ominous, it also comes from the space agency’s own in-house watchdog, the Office of Inspector General, or OIG. When the time comes, Axiom says, it would detach its components and reconfigure them with other parts for a new station. There is a fourth contender, by the way: Axiom Space, a startup company, signed a contract in 2020 to build at least one new module for the ISS by mid-decade.

'We see, by the end of this decade, multiple, privately owned space stations.” “We don’t see, coming out of this, one winner,” says Jeffrey Manber, Nanoracks’ chair and co-founder. SpaceX has said the same ship can be used for many purposes in Earth orbit and deep space.

THE INTERNATIONAL SPACE STATION FREE

NASA’s plan, for some years, has been for private industry to take over the routine work of space operations, with NASA as “one of many paying customers.” If it works-as it has in the case of SpaceX ferrying astronauts to and from the ISS-NASA says it will save billions of dollars and free the agency to go explore the cosmos.Īrtist's conception of the SpaceX Starship on the surface of the moon. NASA has now awarded US $415.6 million to three aerospace consortiums to develop a new “commercial low Earth orbit destination.” One team is led by Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin, another by the satellite company Nanoracks, and the third by the aerospace giant Northrop Grumman. So what might a new station look like? And who will lead the charge? Meanwhile, it’s trying to get the next station into orbit as quickly as possible. NASA is officially supposed to retire the ISS by 2024, though it says that can probably be pushed back to 2030. The station is slowly leaking air, presumably from stress cracks in its hull that crew members have struggled to locate, and it’s getting increasingly expensive to maintain as parts wear out.

The international space station