Historical buildings, such as Alexander Graham Bell’s home in Nova Scotia, often become museums or national historic sites that preserve their heritage for future generations.
So how do you preserve a building the size of a football field that is orbiting 400 kilometres above the Earth?
NASA’s official plan is to deorbit the International Space Station (ISS) at the end of its life, which means they will send it in a controlled death plunge back into Earth’s atmosphere, where it will crash in a remote part of the ocean.
But this week, some members of the U.S. Government advanced legislation which, in part, asks NASA to reconsider that option, and to investigate whether it’s possible to store it in low Earth orbit instead.
Since 2000, the ISS has been continuously occupied by hundreds of astronauts and cosmonauts from the U.S., Russia, Canada, Europe and Japan. It was assembled piece-by-piece by 36 space shuttle flights and six Russian Proton and Soyuz launches.
With a mass over 400 metric tonnes, it is the largest scientific laboratory ever launched into space, and has housed hundreds of experiments that are unique to a microgravity environment.
Now its useful life is coming to an end. In January 2022, NASA announced the space station will be decommissioned in 2030, and be deorbited in 2031.
The current plan is that a rocket provided by SpaceX will drive it into a crash course through the atmosphere, where it will burn up over a remote section of the Pacific. This was the fate of the predecessor to the ISS, the Russian Space Station MIR, which was driven into the Pacific in 2001.
But some aren’t sold on this plan. On February 4, U.S. Rep. George Whitesides, a former NASA chief of staff, submitted a proposal to Members of the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee, asking to investigate other options before committing the ISS to a fiery death. The motion passed the first stage unanimously, with bipartisan support.
“The International Space Station is one of the most complex engineering achievements in human history,” Whitesides said before the committee.
“Before we permanently dispose of an asset of this magnitude, should we fully understand whether it’s viable to preserve it in orbit for potential use by future generations?”
But the solution is not all that simple.
First of all, the ISS cannot be simply abandoned for very long waiting for new tenants to arrive.
The entire complex passes through the thin upper layers of our atmosphere, which exerts a constant drag, slowing the station down and causing it to gradually fall out of orbit. Throughout its lifetime, it has to be regularly boosted back up into its proper orbit to keep it aloft the way a balloon must be constantly tapped to keep it in the air.
If the ISS was simply left alone, in just one to two years it would crash to Earth in an unpredictable way. This was the fate of Skylab, the first U.S. space station, which fell to Earth in 1979 with pieces coming down in Australia. Fortunately no one was hurt.
No one wants a repeat incident with flaming wreckage from the ISS raining down over a city. So that is not an option.
Without knowing for certain where the space station will make its entrance, Canadian authorities are ready.
Another idea is to boost it to an even higher orbit so it will stay aloft longer, but that would require a lot of fuel, and a rocket bigger than anything that currently exists. Engineers are not even sure whether the giant station, made of many different modules hooked together, could survive the stresses of being pushed hard from one end.
In a 2024 report, NASA says that a higher orbit would also put the ISS at an “unacceptably high” risk of a catastrophic collision with space debris. The report adds that such an impact could result in 220 million pieces of debris being added to our already crowded atmosphere, which could make low earth orbit inaccessible for centuries to come.
Even if it was boosted higher, the massive complex requires constant maintenance. Occupants of the space station spend a good deal of their time fixing and repairing everything from the space toilet to external piping for the cooling system, which is constantly under strain from the harsh environment of space. A lack of maintenance would cause components to deteriorate over time, possibly to the point where the station would become unusable or unsafe.
NASA also already put out a call to private companies to see if anyone wanted to take over the ISS for their own uses, but received no feasible proposals. It would be much cheaper and easier to build something new than to maintain what’s already up there.
Even though NASA is turning its focus to going back to the moon and possibly on to Mars, that does not mean the end to orbiting space stations. China already has one called Tiangong, which has been operating since 2022, and several private companies plan to build their own small versions, such as Haven-1, which is scheduled to launch as early as 2027.
There are even highly optimistic proposals to build giant space hotels utilizing huge rotating wheels to produce artificial gravity, similar to the one depicted in the science fiction movie 2001 a Space Odyssey.
The bill put forth by Rep. Whitesides still has several more steps to go before it becomes official, and even then, it is only asking NASA to investigate the feasibility of these other ideas.
Considering the costs and logistics of preserving the International Space Station as a heritage site, it still seems most likely that after 30 years of operation, the world’s largest, most expensive space laboratory — at $100 billion US — will end up incinerated in the upper atmosphere with larger pieces ending up at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean.
Unless someone can come up with a better idea.
