New Agreement Buys an Additional 45,213 Orbits

The International Space Station partners—the United States, Japan, Canada, and participating E.U. nations—have committed to extending the life and operations of the unique orbital platform in which multinational space-farers have lived and worked for upwards of 22-years, all the while conducting cutting-edge research in microgravity for the benefit of humankind.

Robyn Gatens, director of the International Space Station Division at NASA’s Washington D.C. headquarters stated: “The International Space Station is an incredible partnership with a common goal to advance science and exploration. Extending our time aboard this amazing platform allows us to reap the benefits of more than two-decades of experiments and technology demonstrations, as well as continue to materialize even greater discovery to come.”

The members of the ISS consortium—excepting Russia—have asserted their respective intentions of financially, academically, and materially supporting ISS operations through 2030. The station was originally chartered to operate through 2024. The Russian Federation, however, in the wake of international tensions and economic and technological sanctions imposed following Moscow’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine—will withdraw from the ISS initiative in 2028.

Notwithstanding Russia’s departure, NASA and its partner Japanese, Canadian, and E.U. agencies will continue to work to ensure an uninterrupted human presence in low Earth orbit and make ready for a safe and orderly eventual transition from the ISS to future, commercial orbital platforms.

The ISS is a unique scientific installation within which crew-members conduct experiments across multiple research disciplines, to include the terrestrial and space sciences, biology, human physiology, physics, and technology demonstrations impossible to perform on Earth’s surface. Since its 1998 launch, the International Space Station has been visited by 266 individuals from twenty countries.

In addition to expanding and maintaining the mammoth orbital facility, the ISS crews living aboard the station have skillfully and steadfastly served as the metaphorical eyes and hands of thousands of earthbound researchers—performing over 3,300 experiments in the microgravity of Low Earth Orbit (LEO). In the station’s final years, numerous long-term experiments are slated to come to fruition, yielding data-sets decades in the making.

The ISS is among the most complex international collaborations ever attempted. The station was designed to be interdependent, and relies on contributions from across the international partnership to function. Currently, no single ISS partner is capable of operating the installation without the others. Ergo, Russia’s decision to opt out of the ISS partnership occasions numerous and worrying issues, principal among which is the stone-cold fact that the station’s Russian module provides the propulsion by which the football-field-sized contraption is kept from falling to Earth. Were Russia to shutter its stake in the ISS outright, the U.S. and its remaining partner nations would be hard-pressed to devise alternate means of periodically correcting the station’s orbit.

Russia has previously alluded to building its own orbital outpost. Such an enterprise, however, would require a financial commitment Moscow would be hard-pressed to make under the best of circumstances—let alone while engaged in a protracted shooting war with Ukraine and isolated both technically and economically from the Western World.

Russia’s fallings out among the international and space communities extend beyond Moscow’s obduracy toward the ISS. In late 2022, the European Space Agency (ESA) ended a collaboration with Roskosmos—the state corporation by which Russian space endeavors are administered—that was to have seen the two entities launch a rover to Mars. The snub compelled Russia to discontinue operations of its Soyuz spacecraft from an ESA launch site in French Guiana.

Russia and its former Soviet iteration have contributed significantly to humankind’s exploration of space. That the nation should betray its spacefaring tradition by rashly ending its involvement in the International Space Station is unfortunate and sullies a dazzling succession of accomplishments dating back to Sputnik and Gagarin.

FMI: www.nasa.gov