The twenty-three-year-old International Space Station program is the latest from NASA submission it could run until 2030, so it should be retired within nine years. It would be replaced by space ports and space stations developed by private companies, as planned by the U.S. Space Agency.
The humanity the most expensive so far The ISS, which is part of its scientific project, was originally designed for a lifespan of 15 years and has already achieved one and a half times that. The station errors around despite this, NASA has so far believed that the ISS will certainly remain functional by 2024, and that will be exploited.
The space agency is confident that the space stations developed by private companies will be operational by 2028, so that work on the ISS can be stopped and medical-physiological experiments can be relocated to the former. According to NASA, if there is no operational civilian station, long-range human flights, such as missions to Mars, will be jeopardized.
The ISS currently operates at a minimum annual maintenance cost of $ 3 billion ($ 966 billion 483 million), but the costs are steadily rising as the ISS and its modules age.
Repair costs, for example, have risen 35 percent in the past five years.
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Due to expensive maintenance on the one hand, and failures and the threat posed by the latter on the other, new devices will be needed, either in orbit around the planet or further away, to maintain a long-term human presence in space. To do this, China, for example, after being banned from the ISS program, has its own space station build, the Russians are also planned a new own station, and the Americans would entrust the task to private space companies.
Not a hotel, a lab
As about we wrote earlier, SpaceX, Blue Origin and Lockheed Martin, among others, were among those companies. NASA finally used Blue Origin, Nanoracks LLC and Northrop Grumman to prepare plans for the private space station. asked For $ 130 million, $ 160 million, and $ 125.6 million. The three companies are due to present their plans by 2025, with commissioning set to move into the second half of the decade. The U.S. space agency also has $ 140 million alive you have a contract also with Axiom Space, which is currently working on ISS-pluggable modules that can be disconnected at the end of the International Space Station’s life and then recycled to another station.
It is planned that private space stations will not primarily be space hotels for wealthy guests, but rather research stations, orbiting laboratories, as is the ISS.
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Thus, companies wishing to conduct microgravity research would pay for the use of laboratories orbiting the Earth, which could generate ongoing revenue. Of course, this does not rule out the possibility that these facilities will receive space tourists.
When the International Space Station watch strikes the last one, destroying the station will be a complicated and costly task. THE National Geographic it estimates it will cost $ 1 billion, and if NASA really wants the station to be destroyed by 2030, it will have to be gradually lowered between November 2026 and April 2028. The process of atmospheric descent and combustion cannot be planned for a long time, as the behavior of the atmosphere is influenced by solar activity, for which there are only attempts to accurately predict it, there is no proven method. Because the ISS is huge in size, 16 percent of its mass would not burn in the atmosphere. The remains would be routed to a Pacific satellite cemetery, where, for example, ESA Jules Verne’s automatic cargo ship remnants were also placed, or where the Russians Mir space station he also returned to the unburned part of the atmosphere forever.
NASA plans to spend the money saved from maintaining the International Space Station first on the Artemis program and later on it to support Mars research.
(Cover image: NASA / Getty Images)
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