Congress can save the space station – if space activists demand it

While NASA’s old regime imposed a death sentence on the International Space Station, the orbital outpost, an unparalleled beacon of human invention, may still be saved by the space agency’s new wunderkind leader and by the strongest ISS advocates in all of Congress, leading U.S. space scientists say.

If space activists pressure representatives in both houses of Congress to push for a reversal of this ruling, it could tip the balance in favor of lawmakers who want to send the space 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 the decree that the space station must burn through a fiery atmospheric reentry and then crash into the Antarctic seas in five years, Professor Thangavelu told me in an interview.

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

Leading lights in the aerospace sectorand around the world, are calling for the ISS to be placed in safe orbit as well, protected as a super icon of the world’s unfolding space civilization for citizens of the future.

There are already signs that 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 to a high-altitude refuge.

NASA’s former leadership tasked SpaceX with developing a terminator spacecraft that, like a modern Styx ferry, would force the ISS into an afterlife netherworld.

Still, Thangavelu told me that NASA’s next-generation torchbearers could reverse that judgment by tasking SpaceX with developing a booster that would act as a savior rather than a killer of the ISS, sending the station to the higher heavens.

A joint appeal from the former directors of the European Space Agency and NASA, who together oversaw the station’s construction a generation ago, urged NASA to launch a rescue mission for the ISS, a goal that has gained supporters worldwide.

Their open letter, addressed to the space agency’s five partners on the ISS, NASA’s current leaders and the outpost’s countless admirers across the continents, called for the $150 billion super spacecraft to be protected as a heavenly shrine to space travel.

“The International Space Station is the largest, most complex and most important element of space infrastructure deployed to date, and one of the most incredible engineering achievements in human history,” they emphasized in their call.

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

These two global titans of aerospace engineering added that “to move the ISS from its current 400 kilometer altitude to a circular orbit at 800 kilometers altitude would require a boost of approximately 220 meters per second, approximately the same as that required for precise de-orbit control.”

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

Jean-Jacques Dordain, Director General of ESA when the International Space Station was being assembled, told me in an earlier interview that instead of crashing into the sea, the space station should be guided upwards, as a gift to space explorers of future times.

While NASA originally tasked SpaceX with developing a spacecraft that would push the ISS toward its deep-sea denouement, Director General Dordain told me that the same booster could instead be used to give the station new life, lifting it above the atmospheric drag now pulling the outpost back to Earth.

“The pressure required to plunge it into the ocean (risky venture, this!) is about the same as it is to launch this enormously complex ISS into a safe orbit where future generations can visit and appreciate it,” says Thangavelu.

But space exploration activists in the United States must act quickly to convince Capitol Hill to commit to a new future for the ISS, he says.

“Now is the time for advocacy groups and citizen groups to stoke the fire under Congress by writing or calling… we need to send them.”

“As director of the National Space Society,” he added, “I am in constant discussions with our leaders to save the ISS.”

“There’s an annual ‘March Storm’ coming, where we go straight to Congress to express our thoughts,” in a flurry of face-to-face meetings with the most influential members of Congress who support the umbrella space program and shape NASA’s future master plans, says Thangavelu.

“This ISS issue,” he adds, “also resonates in other citizen advocacy groups such as 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 that the International Space Station could eventually become the centerpiece of his envisioned International Space Museum, a fantastic floating citadel to showcase breakthroughs in space travel that could extend for centuries to come.

Conceptual designer of space stations, Lunar habitats and other alien outpostsProfessor Thangavelu says this celestial museum could house other outstanding icons of space design that mark the rise of the world’s first space culture and the development of a multi-planetary civilization.

Meanwhile, he says the new ISS bill, proposed by Congressman Whitesides, former director of the National Space Society and chief of staff at NASA, could be the perfect springboard for a renewed campaign by citizens and scientists to create an alternative future for the International Space Station.

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

The station’s uniqueness and value, he added, warrants NASA “conducting an engineering analysis to evaluate the technical, operational and logistical feasibility of transferring the ISS to a safe orbital haven… following the end of the ISS’s operational life in low Earth orbit to preserve the ISS for potential future reuse.”

The bill was unanimously approved by the House of Representatives Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, which was just the first stage in the process of passing 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 Congress’ new overture on changing the station’s fate.

“The bill introduced by Congressman George Whitesides to have NASA look at alternatives to deorbiting the ISS is exactly the right step for what I would call the New American Space Agenda,” said Tumlinson, who has long advocated for human settlements spreading throughout the solar system and beyond through his EarthLight Foundation.

Dooming the space station to an explosive exit, poisoning the atmosphere and Antarctic seas, he adds, “is exactly the wrong message to send to the generation about to take command of our government.”

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

Tumlinson says he has been liaising with astronauts once stationed on the ISS, along with the inventors of the new independent space stations that will fly after the ISS is decommissioned, to jointly pressure Congress to force NASA to abandon its plan to destroy the iconic groundbreaking laboratory.

In the US and Europe, Tumlinson is considered one of the key shapers of the exploding NewSpace sector, where the dynamic designers of independent rockets and space stations are rapidly changing the trajectory of human spaceflight.

His angel investor group SpaceFund has funneled money to some of NewSpace’s rising stars, ranging from SpaceX, inventor of the first potential Mars Express, Starship, to the builders of future space stations Axiom and Voyager.

He says leaders in the Senate and House of Representatives should be informed that a booster that could send the ISS to a new, nearly eternal orbital ring could be perfected before the station begins its second life above Earth.

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

• It indicates that we are moving to the border to stay.
• It prevents a possible catastrophe if something goes wrong along the way.
• It symbolizes a new recycling/reuse culture emerging in space.
• It saves NASA from itself – and a disastrous PR move – just as we’re about to open the border.”

“I urge everyone in this field or beyond to honor what was done during this historic period [orbiting] building, and/or believes we will remain there, to contact their representatives and support this bill,” Tumlinson said.“If you’re a NASA fan, do it to save their history.

In his latest book, Why space?: The purpose of peopleTumlinson says the joint construction of the International Space Station by a coalition of space powers represents one of the giant leaps in the global co-creation of a space civilization.

In this process, he adds, humanity is reinventing itself and its future expansion into 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 well into the future.