Like many recently, I was pretty surprised to learn official plans call for the deorbiting and destruction of the International Space Station (ISS) in 2015. The international team won’t even be done building the thing until 2011! What gives?
I’d thought things were going well for it, what with the crew doubling from three to six in May and the installation of the Japanese “space porch” a few weeks ago. But unfortunately the ISS has funds for only a few more years. For it to stay in orbit (let alone remain operational) would require immediate fundraising. And in the midst of a recession, paying to keep an aging space station might not be the highest priority.
Most of the countries involved — Russia, Japan, Canada, the 10 member countries of the European Space Agency, and the United States — want to keep the ISS going. Plus, the 2015 end date is the original one, so it doesn’t take into account any delays. In order to do everything the ISS set out to do, that date would have to be pushed back a few years. But whether wanting to complete everything on the ISS’s to-do list actually translates into real money, we have yet to see.
Apparently, there’s also the minor wrinkle that Russia has said it’s going to keep using the station no matter what the United States decides. NASA thinks that’s not technically possible, but former station commander Leroy Chiao cautioned Discovery News, “They’re pretty clever and we should not underestimate their ability to do something like that.” It’s pretty amusing to think that, even in such a post-modern world, something like willfully taking over a space station can be so seriously discussed. Sounds like a job for 007.
Either way, I bet I’m not the only one a little curious about the fate of the biggest space station in the galaxy (as far as we know). I wasn’t exactly the ISS’s biggest fan, but it seems supremely silly to me that we’d let an investment some estimates put at over $100 billion just fall into the ocean. Of course, this is a silly world sometimes, so who knows what’ll happen.
What do you think? Should the ISS get an extension? Or is it high time we put the ISS to rest, and maybe use it in the next James Bond movie?
Photo credit: ESA