NASA sets sights on private space stations
The International Space Station, the most complex and costly human-made space structure, may be deorbited or privatised
As Washington returns its sights to the moon, it is reforming its policies regarding the International Space Station (ISS) with a view to jump-starting a 'low-earth orbit economy' in which private firms offer services to corporate clients, foreign governments and wealthy individuals.
What next
The next five years should make it clearer whether private space stations are viable without relying on US government contracts. Either way, the idea of enabling private entrepreneurship makes continued government spending on space stations more acceptable to dominant economic (and especially Republican) sensibilities concerning the appropriate role of government.
Subsidiary Impacts
- China's space station, due for completion in 2022, could draw third-country projects away from commercial US space stations.
- Governments are more promising clients for commercial crewed spaceflight than 'space tourists' are.
- Commercial stations and passenger spacecraft could make human spaceflight accessible to allied states.
- Spaceflight will remain politicised.
Analysis
The ISS is the size of a football field; the habitable part is roughly equivalent to that of a Boeing 747.
Construction began in 1998 and took almost a decade to complete. It has been continuously occupied since 2000. The total cost of building it is estimated at over 100 billion dollars, of which the United States provided 75 billion. It costs around 3-4 billion dollars annually to operate.
The ISS is permanently crewed and has a long-duration maximum capacity of seven. Since 2009 it has been the sole destination of all the world's crewed spaceflights except China's.
It is the longest-running and most successful international space cooperation initiative ever, Western cooperation with Russia being largely unaffected by the Crimea and Ukraine crises.
The international agreements governing the station's design, construction and use were signed in 1998 by:
- the United States;
- Russia;
- Japan;
- Canada; and
- participating countries of the European Space Agency (ESA).
The United States, Russia, ESA and Japan have all contributed modules. Canada provided the robotic arm.
The station is a laboratory for experiments that require a low-gravity environment, and a base for astronomy and experimental space engineering. A major goal is the knowledge necessary for crewed interplanetary missions.
$80mn
Per seat cost of sending astronauts to the ISS on Soyuz
Uncrewed Russian, US, Japanese and European spacecraft have been resupplying the station, but since 2011 only Russia is able to transport astronauts, for which it charges around 80 million dollars per seat.
The SpaceX Crew Dragon and Boeing Starliner, now scheduled to begin operation next year, are supposed to reduce costs to 60 million dollars per seat, eliminate Russia's monopoly and offer private flights. However, a US government report earlier this year recommended plans to purchase additional seats on the Russian spacecraft Soyuz in case of further delays.
Commercialisation
The participants have committed to funding the ISS until at least 2024. It is not envisaged as operating permanently, but no date has been set for deorbiting it.
NASA plans to maintain a continuous human presence in orbit after that by fostering a self-sustaining 'low-earth orbit economy' based on privately owned and operated space stations, of which NASA will be one customer. The dual aim is to reduce costs for NASA and promote economic growth by creating a new industrial sector based on production techniques that are only possible in a low-gravity environment (see INTERNATIONAL: Space mining is a serious proposition - June 18, 2018).
NASA took a step towards this in June, releasing a plan to allow businesses to rent ISS facilities for manufacturing and production in addition to the commercial R&D already undertaken.
The level of uptake by commercial users will give some idea of how much commercial demand there will be for the private space stations under development by hotel billionaire Robert Bigelow's space firm. A test model was attached to the ISS in 2016 and has performed so well that its initial two-year life was extended to five, and then this August extended to 2028.
Bigelow Space Operations in June announced that it had booked four SpaceX launches to the ISS for private passengers. US-based Space Adventures, which sent seven private passengers to the ISS on Russian spacecraft in the 2000s, will sell 'spare' seats on Boeing's NASA launches.
Bigelow's innovative space station modules are constructed of a flexible fabric-like material around a metal frame that is collapsed while in transit and expanded once in space, making them cheaper to build and launch than the metal space station modules currently used, and possibly safer. The media sometimes characterise Bigelow's modules as 'inflatable space hotels', but the company appears to envisage governments as the primary market.
Bigelow has said its modules will be ready once the Starliner and Crew Dragon are flying, and plans to launch two large modules as a stand-alone space station in 2021.
The Gateway will allow intergovernmental cooperation after the ISS is retired or privatised
The US firm Axiom Space last December presented a plan to attach its own modules to the ISS starting in 2023, which it plans to detach to become a stand-alone space station when the ISS is deorbited.
A planned space station called the Gateway is envisioned as sustaining the culture and mechanisms of intergovernmental cooperation built through the ISS.
The Lunar Gateway
The Gateway will be a small space station orbiting the moon. Spacecraft from earth will dock with it, and separate lunar landers will carry astronauts and cargo between the Gateway and the lunar surface.
Canada in February became the first country to make a firm commitment to cooperating with NASA on the Gateway. It will contribute a robotic arm, a more advanced version of those it provided for the Space Shuttle and ISS.
The Gateway is integral to NASA's plans to return humans to the moon (see UNITED STATES: Moon plan will need private money - July 24, 2019). The sharp acceleration of those plans with the launch of the Artemis programme earlier this year casts the Gateway more clearly as a US project, giving international partners less say.
A basic version will now be built by the United States alone, in order to meet President Donald Trump administration's new 2024 moon landing deadline:
- NASA in May awarded a 375-million-dollar fixed-price contract to satellite manufacture Maxar, in partnership with Jeff Bezos's Blue Origin, to build the Gateway's power and propulsion element.
- In July NASA gave the contract for a habitation module to Northrop Grumman without full and open competition, citing the tight 2024 deadline -- a conspicuous setback for efforts to improve efficiency at NASA and promote the private space economy by soliciting competitive bids.
- In August, NASA announced that contracts worth 7 billion dollars for cargo transportation to the Gateway would be open to bids.
Constraints
The ISS partner countries recommitted in August to cooperating on the Gateway in a way that accommodates NASA's accelerated lunar landing plans. However, no timetable has been announced and participation will be hostage to each country's domestic politics and fiscal constraints.
The credibility of NASA's plans will also factor into their willingness to commit; the 2024 moon landing deadline looks unfeasibly tight and funding is uncertain. NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said in August that the Gateway would operate for at least 15 years, but this is a statement of the technical capability being pursued, not a political commitment.
Diplomatic concerns will factor in too, and may have been on Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's mind when he announced in May -- amid threats of US tariffs and doubts about the future of the Japan-US defence alliance -- that Japan would cooperate with the Trump administration's new moon landing programme.
