NASA OIG Report Casts Doubt On Space Station Plans Present – And Future
Keith’s note: According to a NASA OIG report NASA’s Management of Risks to Sustaining ISS Operations through 2030: “After more than a decade of effort, NASA and its partners continue to develop a transition and deorbit plan to prevent an operations gap in LEO and ensure a safe and controlled deorbit of the ISS. Russia has not committed to ISS operations through 2030, which includes the deorbit plan and timeline. Without commitment from Russia to the current deorbit plan, the ability to conduct a controlled deorbit is unclear. In June 2024, NASA awarded a contract to SpaceX to develop the U.S. deorbit vehicle to execute the controlled deorbit of the ISS in 2031. Nonetheless, the uncertainty of commercial LEO destination-readiness, limited budget availability, and the potential delay in availability of the U.S. deorbit vehicle adds more schedule challenges and risks to NASA’s 2031 deorbit plan.”
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International Space Station has been a great success in terms of showing that a major space facility can be designed, launched from Earth and assembled in orbit. ISS has also been a great success in terms of enlisting international partners. As a space laboratory for studying human physiology and human adaptation to the zero-G environment, ISS has also had success.
But as a space laboratory for studying virtually anything else ISS has not been successful. For the first 15 years NASA made the hoops researchers had to jump through in order to conduct science on ISS far too difficult and time consuming. That was appalling since the prior 24 years of operations in human spaceflight on Shuttle, Spacehab and Mir developed streamlined processes. The ISS program managers threw all of that away.
NASA also used to sponsor research in human space flight and thanks to short-sighed NASA managers they terminated the sponsored research so they could send the money to their overpriced and underperforming contractors.
ISS was supposed to provide new facilities for multi=G experimentation. In another “cost-saving” the NASA ISS managers cancelled those facilities for no particularly good reasons-the modules had already been well along in construction and the savings were minuscule.
Today there is very little new science or research done on ISS. Mostly astronauts repeat decades old ‘experiments’ just to have something to occupy their time.
After spending $150-200 billion on ISS it would be a shame to terminate ISS anytime soon unless serious failures plagued its operations and that has not happened.
Is there anyone willing to pay for a new “commercial” space station. Not at all likely.
The best thing would be to find someone to take over day-to=day operations of ISS in order to minimize costs and maximize utility. Assuming the costs can be minimized it makes no sense to terminate the ISS anytime soon. And get some people involved in research for materials processing, pharmaceutical development, or other prospective areas to lead the research, including recruiting new prospects. NASA and those hit oversees trying to do this job, should get out of it because they have not been successful.