The end of the ISS will usher in a more commercialized future in space

Sometime in 2030, astronauts will pack up their belongings, turn out the lights, and depart the International Space Station (ISS) for the last time. The trajectory of this grand old structure will be adjusted, putting it further into the path of Earth’s atmosphere over the next year, and then a specially designed deorbit vehicle attached to the station will perform one long reentry burn, pushing the station down into the atmosphere. 

As the station hits the atmosphere at thousands of miles per hour, first the structure’s giant solar arrays and radiators will be ripped off; then each of the modules will separate; and finally, the truss structure that makes up the backbone of the station will break up. Each of these pieces will have their surfaces stripped away as they reach temperatures of thousands of degrees, exposing interior structures that will burn up, metal melting and vaporizing, with the last remaining pieces splashing down into the ocean far from land.

Thus will end the ISS, an icon of the space age that will have served humanity for more than three decades.

In its place, NASA envisions one or more commercial space stations, each run by a private company for profit and part of a thriving space economy, providing a more modern and efficient platform for humanity — including NASA astronauts — to inhabit low-Earth orbit. 

But there isn’t much time. Companies are racing to get their space station concepts ready. If we want to maintain a continuous human presence in space, which we’ve had for over 20 years, the private sector only has a handful of years to get those designs built, tested, launched, and inhabited. There’s never been a commercial space station before, and the economic outlook is murky. 

In space, no one knows whether there’s money to be made or not.

There are good reasons for deorbiting the ISS. Mostly, it’s just old, and repairing or replacing the hardware would be expensive. Every year that it continues to operate costs money, so switching to a commercial model could be a feasible alternative — if it can happen in time.

NASA has emphasized its desire to become a customer of space companies — one customer among many, is the idea — in order to reduce costs and get infrastructure built.

This model has had undeniable success in the Commercial Crew program, which, despite difficulties with the Boeing Starliner, has provided two space transport vehicles that can carry humans into orbit for a fraction of the price the agency would likely have spent developing its own vehicle. A similar program, Commercial Cargo, has seen private companies delivering equipment, supplies, and experiments to the ISS since 2012.

Now, NASA wants to build on these successes and apply these principles to stations in low-Earth orbit, or LEO.

“By transitioning off a US government owned and operated platform to a commercial platform, it is our goal to reduce costs, to open up to other customers and provide that commercialization that will reduce costs for all of us and provide new ways of doing business,” said Angela Hart, manager of NASA’s Commercial LEO Development Program.

There are two companies working on their own independent space station designs, Blue Origin and Starlab Space, as well as a third, Axiom Space, that is starting to develop its own modular station infrastructure that will begin life attached to the ISS. All three companies receive NASA funding to develop their concepts, and many more have expressed interest in building a space station, too, Hart said. So many, in fact, that NASA offered a second round of unfunded agreements currently covering three additional companies.

On such a tight timescale, however, there’s the worrying specter of potential delays. And as both the SpaceX Crew Dragon and Boeing Starliner showed, private companies are just as prone to missed deadlines as NASA.

Will the station (or stations) be ready in time? “It’s absolutely a concern,” Hart said. “One of our top risks is schedule. The idea of developing a commercial space station and having it in orbit by 2029, which is our goal, is a daunting task.” NASA has been negotiating with these companies since 2018, but there is a possibility that they won’t be launched before the ISS is scheduled for deorbit: “We also have to prepare for what we do if we do have a gap.”

One possibility is to extend the life of the ISS or to open a commercial station with minimal capabilities. But Hart is realistic that the plan might involve some loss of facilities during the transition. “We may have to accept that we are not going to have on day one the same capabilities that we have on ISS today. We expect this will be an evolution.”

With the incoming Trump administration, people across the country are bracing for a turbulent and potentially chaotic transition. Along with other government agencies for whom the future is unclear, the priorities of NASA may be forced to shift to reflect the interests of President-elect Donald Trump and his allies — which may or may not include an interest in space stations.

“With the recent presidential election, I assume going to Mars and possibly the Moon will be a priority for NASA in the new administration,” said Roger Handberg, political science professor and space policy expert from the University of Central Florida. But he added, “That doesn’t mean that the ISS is not continually important.”

Indeed, experts agree that LEO operations are not going anywhere, even with future interest in deep space exploration. “No matter what we’re doing out in space, it’s much easier and cheaper to test it in LEO before we go other places,” Hart said. “So we’ll always have needs in low-Earth orbit.”

NASA’s stated aim is to have at least two crew members per year on a commercial space station, which is less than the current typical rate. Hart says that’s enough to meet NASA’s science goals, which will continue to include basic research, but others see a waning interest in low-Earth orbit as newer and sexier destinations like Mars take center stage.

“What you’re seeing is a gradual kind of reduction in interest by the government in doing things at the ISS, because that’s the only budget,” Handberg said. “It can’t do everything for everyone.”

Much of the future of space exploration could turn around the whims of powerful individuals like Elon Musk, who already holds considerable influence through SpaceX and looks set to take even more power under a Trump administration. “The arrival again of a Trump administration makes everything very kind of fragile,” Handberg said. “Elon Musk is apparently Best Boy with the President Elect. Now the question people ask is, how long will that last?”

Musk has made it clear that he has a very specific vision of space exploration in terms of sending people to Mars — even as challenges like radiation exposure continue to be a major hurdle to that endeavor. SpaceX has achieved great things with its reusable rockets, but Musk has a history of laying out grandiose and utterly unrealistic timelines for larger space projects — as does Trump — and has shown his willingness to fly in the face of government agencies like the Federal Aviation Administration.

“That’s why NASA is between a rock and a hard place,” Handberg said. “We have somebody who’s kind of out of control, but he has access to the powers that be.”

One of the obvious problems with human space exploration is that it is staggeringly expensive. It does lead to great breakthroughs (technology developed during the Apollo era led to improvements in everything from kidney dialysis machines to firefighting protective equipment), but these tend to be unpredictable and long term. And in the short term, the money needs to come from somewhere.

The plan is for NASA to support the development of commercial space stations so that, in time, they can become economically sustainable with the technological developments they enable. But whether this is possible is an open question.

“Right now, there’s no product that’s produced in space that is so valuable that it justifies the cost of doing business there,” Handberg said. “That’s why commercial space up to this point has been mostly communications based or satellite navigation assets.”

There are promising avenues of research in space that would be attractive to private companies, such as the development of new drugs and drug delivery mechanisms. But who would be willing to front the money for fundamental research, such as the ISS’s Cold Atom Lab, which performs groundbreaking research into quantum physics? 

The hope is that NASA will use its limited budget to continue to fund this kind of research, but the worry is that as costs get trimmed with a focus on human exploration of the Moon and Mars, work that doesn’t have an obvious and immediate practical application will fall by the wayside.

“As we’ve seen so many times, you never know what fundamental science will lead to,” said Bruce Betts, chief scientist at The Planetary Society. “That’s why it’s important to fund these seemingly not necessarily practical things because they may end up changing the world.”

In a purely commercial environment, Betts pointed out, companies are unlikely to be interested in this kind of research: “They’re going to be pursuing whatever makes them money.”

If the focus is going to be on building a sustainable economy in low-Earth orbit, it’s not clear how the kind of scientific breakthroughs that people look to NASA to fund will fit into that. If money is being spent to support commercial development, it isn’t being spent on science research, and those goals are not necessarily in sync.

“Commercial space is not inherently space exploration or space science,” Betts said. “It doesn’t mean they can’t do those things or that they won’t do some of those things. But that, at least now, is not what they are, and those are things that are incredibly valuable to humanity.”

Even with the best intentions on the part of NASA, being a customer of a private space station is quite a different scenario from being an owner and operator of one. NASA may have to cede a significant amount of control over what missions get flown and when. After all, there’s a big difference between buying a seat on a rocket and renting out facilities on a space station.

Betts emphasized that he, along with many other space scientists, is not against commercial space.

“We’re just concerned that people not lose sight of that as they see people going into space [on commercial missions]. And that’s great. People are doing tourism, and some of them are doing education. But it’s not the science, the cutting edge, the ‘let’s learn about who we are and where we came from and where our solar system came from’. That’s gonna be government-sponsored space as far as I can tell.”