US Congressman asks to save ISS from gruesome death

Historic buildings, such as Alexander Graham Bell’s home in Nova Scotia, often become museums or national historic sites that preserve their heritage for future generations.

So how do you protect a building the size of a football field that is orbiting 400 kilometers above Earth?

NASA’s official plan t iso deorbit International Space Station (ISS) at the end of its life, meaning they will send it back into the Earth’s atmosphere in a controlled death, where it will crash in a remote part of the ocean.

But this week, some members of the US government pushed legislation that would, in part, Asked NASA to reconsider that optionand to investFind out if it’s possible to store it in low Earth orbit.

Since 2000, the ISS has been continuously occupied by hundreds of astronauts and cosmonauts from the United States, Russia, Canada, Europe, and Japan. It was assembled piece by piece by 36 Space Shuttle flights and six Russian Proton and Soyuz launches.

With a mass of over 400 metric tons, it is the largest scientific laboratory ever launched into space, and houses hundreds of scientific laboratories.Experiments that are unique to microgravity environments.

Now its useful life is coming to an end. In January 2022, NASA announced The space station will be decommissioned in 2030will be deorbited in D 2031.

The current plan is that a rocket provided by SpaceX will take it through the atmosphere on a crash course, where it will burn up in a remote part of the Pacific. This was the fate of the ISS’s predecessor Russian space station MIRWhich was taken to the Pacific Ocean in 2001.

But some aren’t sold on this plan. On February 4, former NASA Chief of Staff, U.S. Representative George Whitesides, presented a resolution to members of the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee, calling on them to examine other options before incinerating the ISS. The proposal passed unanimously in the first round with bipartisan support.

“The International Space Station is one of the most complex engineering achievements in human history,” Whitesides said. before the committee.

“Before we permanently dispose of property of this magnitude, must we fully understand whether it is feasible to preserve it in orbit for potential use by future generations?”

But the solution is not so simple.

First, the ISS cannot be left to wait too long for new tenants to move in.

The entire complex passes through the thin upper layers of our atmosphere, which creates a constant drag, slowing the station and causing it to slowly fall out of orbit. Throughout its lifetime, it needs to be regularly nudged back into its proper orbit to keep it aloft, just as a balloon needs to be constantly patted to keep it in the air.

If the ISS were left alone, it would crash into Earth unexpectedly in just one to two years. this is what happened skylabThe first American space station, which fell to Earth with fragments in Australia in 1979. Luckily no one was hurt.

No one wants the incident of burning debris from the ISS raining down on the city to happen again. So this is not an option.

Another idea is to take it to an even higher orbit so it can stay aloft longer, but this would require a lot more fuel, and a larger rocket than any currently in existence. Engineers don’t even know whether the massive station, made up of many separate modules linked together, would survive the stress of being pushed hard from one end.

In A report of 2024NASA says a higher orBIT would also put the ISS at an “unacceptably high” risk of catastrophic collision with space debris. The report says such an impact could result in 220 million pieces of debris being added to our already crowded atmosphere, making low-Earth orbit inhospitable for centuries to come.

Even if it is expanded further, the huge complex requires constant maintenance. Space station occupants spend much of their time fixing and repairing everything from space toilets to external piping for the cooling system, which is under constant stress from the harsh environment of space. Lack of maintenance will cause components to deteriorate over time, possibly to the extent that the station becomes unusable or unsafe.

NASA has already put out a call to private companies to see if anyone wants to capture the ISS for their use, but received no viable proposal. It will be much cheaper and easier to create something new than to maintain what already exists.

Even though NASA is turning its attention to getting back to the Moon and possibly Mars, it doesn’t mean the end of orbiting space stations. China already has a call tiangongwhich has been in the works since 2022, and several private companies are planning to build their own smaller versions, such as Heaven-1Which is going to be launched in early 2027.

are even overly optimistic proposal to build giant space hotel Using giant rotating wheels to generate artificial gravity, as depicted in the science fiction film 2001 Space Odyssey.

The bill introduced by Representative Whitesides still needs to take several more steps before it becomes official, and even then, it is only asking NASA to investigate the feasibility of these other ideas.

Considering the costs and logistics of preserving the International Space Station as a heritage site, it is still most likely that after 30 years of operation, the world’s largest, most expensive space laboratory – at $100 billion US – will be incinerated in the upper atmosphere and large pieces will end up at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean.

Unless someone can come up with a better idea.