With sky-high costs for minimal returns, the ISS has failed on both the geopolitical and scientific research fronts.
With sky-high costs for minimal returns, the ISS has failed on both the geopolitical and scientific research fronts.
T his week, the urgent medical evacuation of an astronaut from the International Space Station (ISS) private Crew-11 mission forced the crew to return to Earth. Citing privacy concerns, NASA did not specify the nature of the medical issue or identify the affected crew member, other than noting that the individual is now stable.
This medical evacuation, the first of its kind in the 25-year history of the $150 billion orbiting lab, presents an opportunity to reconsider America’s commitment to the failing ISS. Given that the station was originally intended to cost just $8 billion to build, it’s particularly worth asking what benefit taxpayers have gotten for our money.
Launched in 1998, the ISS is currently being wound down, with retirement planned for 2030. The station expected to be replaced by potential privately-owned stations as part of a push for a “vibrant commercial space economy,” shifting low-Earth-orbit activities from government-led operations to private partnerships. New NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman reaffirmed NASA’s plan to retire the ISS through safe deorbiting or possible resale to commercial interests under a public-private partnership model.
ISS has an annual cost of $4 billion, almost 20 percent of NASA’s budget. That cost is already exceedingly high and will keep rising every year as it’s largely used to plug gaps in the station’s aging infrastructure, not to mention the inherent limit to how much such an old legacy system can be upgraded.
With the mission clearly in its twilight, it’s clear now that the extremely expensive station was of very limited value given the extreme costs, roughly 84 percent of which were paid by America, and decades of effort. It also handed a priceless degree of leverage to Russia via threats of early withdrawal and literally holding American astronauts hostage as blackmail. It’s been more than a decade since Russian Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin threatened to cut off American access to the station our taxpayers almost entirely paid for, saying “I propose that the United States delivers its astronauts to the ISS with the help of a trampoline.”
Until the private sector came to the rescue, America was dangerously dependent on low-quality Russian rockets to access the station, giving that country priceless leverage. In December, one of those Russian rockets exploded and severely damaged its launchpad, indicating any reliability on such devices is inherently dangerous.
The ISS is also generally reliant upon support from Russia to maintain its orbit, as the Kremlin provided its propulsion systems. Without Moscow’s cooperation, the station could enter an uncontrolled deorbit and crash anywhere along its flight path, which passes over China, India, the United States, and much of Europe (but not Russia).
Even more concerning, Russia has previously threatened to crash the ISS and has enough control over the station to do it. It is not an exaggeration to say that such an attack could in fact be deadlier than most of the nuclear bombs in the Kremlin’s arsenal.
Crew-11 consists of private SpaceX astronauts from America, and their departure automatically gave up command of the station from NASA astronaut Mike Fincke to Russian cosmonaut Sergey Kud-Sverchkov. Worryingly, of the three astronauts who will remain behind on the ISS, two will be Russian. Astronaut Christopher Williams will remain as the only American still on the station.
The original intention of the ISS was to serve as a construction and launch facility for future interplanetary spacecraft as well as a scientific testbed. NASA caved to Russia’s demands about the location of its orbit to make it more accessible to launches from that country, which was inherently nonviable for the original purpose of launching interplanetary craft due to the new orbital physics. Clearly, the alleged diplomatic benefit of outreach to Russia originally promised by then President Bill Clinton didn’t materialize: One only needs to look at the war in Ukraine to see that making this concession didn’t improve long-term relations with Russia, despite greatly hampering the station’s original purpose. NASA is simply not suited for doing the job of the State Department, and attempts to make space agencies perform diplomatic tasks will almost certainly create another costly disaster like the ISS.
The ISS’s record as a scientific testbed is also fairly meager, falling well short of initial expectations and achieving only incremental gains rather than the paradigm-shifting discoveries originally envisioned. Most of the “science” conducted on the ISS is of questionable value as well, as the station mostly studies how humans can live and work in a low-gravity environment for extended periods of time. That sounds helpful to a layperson for future crewed missions to Mars, but it is in reality likely to be useless, as it would be possible to simply spin any mission to simulate gravity, thus entirely avoiding the problem NASA has spent decades researching. Why subject American astronauts to harmful conditions to gather useless medical information? Why should American taxpayers pay for such unethical human experiments on our nation’s best and brightest?
Given the station’s high costs, geopolitical risks, and small scientific returns, throwing more money into the ISS makes little sense. Perhaps this week’s medical evacuation is an opportunity to discuss finally putting an end to this $150 billion, out-of-this-world mistake.