Orbit
Space Entrepreneurs May Hold Fate Of ISS
by paul marks
Following the retirement of the space shuttle on 21 July, Americans couldn’t have relished the thought of being dependent on Russian Soyuz rockets to get into space. So when Russia’s space agency Roskosmos said a week later that the 370-tonne International Space Station would be ditched in the Pacific Ocean in 2020, it must have seemed a hit below the belt.
“So, I guess that’s it then,” Keith Cowing wrote, on the blog NASAwatch. “Russia gets to make the decision to scrap something we paid the lion’s share to build and operate.”
It is not quite that simple. Roskosmos was merely reiterating the policy agreed upon by the ISS’s partner space agencies in Russia, Europe, Canada, Japan and the US. If the station is still in good shape in 2020, there is an option to extend the station’s life by a further eight years. But it is far from clear whether government agencies will still be calling the tune come 2020: the raft of commercial space firms now vying to put their stamp on the final frontier could have a big say in how long the station is kept in orbit.
NASA has already commissioned SpaceX of Hawthorne, California, to run cargo flights to the ISS with its Falcon 9 rocket and uncrewed Dragon capsule. SpaceX is also outfitting its capsule with life-support systems to allow astronauts to go along for the ride. Meanwhile, Virgin Galactic hopes to offer suborbital flights in the air-launched SpaceShipTwo rocket, built by Scaled Composites of Mojave, California, in the next couple of years. It could go further, though.
“It is likely that ISS will be extended beyond the current time frame and such extension may involve some public-private partnership,” says George Whitesides, Virgin Galactic CEO and a former NASA chief of staff. “ISS is both an exciting destination in itself and a base for future deep-space operations. Virgin Galactic would certainly be interested in participating in ISS in the future should national agencies be open to the conversation,” he says.
Read the full article at NewScientist.com
Tags: Dragon spacecraft, International Space Station, ISS, Japanese Space Agency, JAXA, NASA, Roscosmos, Scaled Composites, Soyuz, Space, Space Shuttle, spacecraft, spaceflight, SpaceshipTwo, SpaceX, Virgin Galactic
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