by The International Space Station may be flying beyond 2030.
A senior NASA official said there are “no major concerns” about the health of the International Space Station (ISS) that would require an operational shutdown six years from now, when the current agreement expires between most of the ISS partners.
“There is nothing magical that will happen in 2030,” Steve Stich, manager of the commercial crew program at NASA Johnson Space Center (JSC) in Houston, said during a live-streamed briefing at the center on Thursday (January 25) because on the upcoming SpaceX. Crew-8 astronaut mission to the ISS.
Stich said NASA anticipates the advancement of commercial space stations that will host agency and science astronauts in the 2030s. “We want them [the commercial stations] be supportive, and then when they’re ready to go, that’s when ISS will move out of the way,” he said.
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Keeping the more than 25-year-old ISS flying beyond 2030 will require more than good health, however. Funding must continue as NASA develops and most ISS partners develop expensive lunar crewed missions, under the NASA-led Artemis program and international Artemis Agreements that include more than 30 countries.
And politics is also a factor: Russia will most likely have to expand its own participation beyond the current limit of 2028. Relations between the United States and Russia have been extremely tense since early 2022, when Russia invaded Ukraine and most of the international space relations with Russia fell apart.
The ISS continues for policy reasons and remains largely unaffected by the invasion of Ukraine, NASA has stressed, despite high-level disputes over anti-Ukrainian propaganda displayed by cosmonauts on the station. Meanwhile, Russia is pursuing its policy with China regarding another crewed lunar program.
And Russia has only promised to remain a partner on the ISS until 2028. This is no small matter, as the Russian and US sides are so closely integrated that it is impossible to split the orbiting laboratory apart, according to NASA materials.
That said, Russia’s executive director of human spaceflight programs appeared to welcome the ISS extension discussion in remarks broadcast at a press conference at JSC on Thursday.
In English, Sergei Krikalev of Roscosmos said that Russia set the 2028 deadline because “the cycle of extending the life of the station has been done on a four-year cycle on our side,” referring to how the Russian space agency’s budget is force. The lack of extension until 2030 is not until now “because we have some kind of disagreement” with NASA, he said.
“You ask how long a workstation can be in the future? We don’t really know,” continued Krikalev. “That’s why we continue our flight, [to] do our tests and see new data. We need to make assessments for the future … life extension.”
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The future of work in low Earth orbit will be after a commercial ISS, NASA has emphasized, and in late 2021 the agency funded three US teams to carry out early phase work. The two groups of vendors now working include one team co-led by Blue Origin and Sierra Space and another led by Voyager Space. (A third team, Northrop Grumman, announced Oct. 4 that it will move to the Voyager Space team rather than operate independently.)
In addition, another company, Axiom Space, is working to develop its own space station outside of that particular funding framework.
Early-stage design and testing of these commercial complexes continues, and NASA officials have often said they want to minimize any potential space gap after 2030 as much as possible when planning the t -transfer from ISS to commercial platforms. Large space projects often run over time and budget, however, and there are other risks as well: high inflation that could increase costs significantly and a US election year, which could change space policy, to some to name them.
Recently, discussions at senior agency levels have focused on preparing commercial vendors for human rating standards for safely onboarding astronauts. In October 2023, NASA opened a new solicitation asking early industry “feedback on the requirements for new commercial space stations,” especially the human rating.
That solicitation was in the same month that NASA’s Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel recommended the agency maintain a “comprehensive understanding” of astronaut safety guidelines, according to SpaceNews, based on testimony given at a public meeting on October 26, 2023 in Washington, DC.
