Since November 2000, on board this scientific laboratory, the size of a football field, there are always several people, circling the planet at eight kilometers per second.
With a new crew of astronauts set to blast off to the station next week, some of those who have helped the station from the ground are nostalgic for its imminent demise.
“The ISS is a cathedral for human cooperation and collaboration across borders, languages ​​and cultures,” John Horack, former director of NASA’s Office of Science and Mission Systems, told AFP.
“For more than 25 years, we’ve had people in space, 24/7, 365 days a year,” added Horack, who now holds the Neil Armstrong Chair in Aerospace Policy at The Ohio State University.
“It’s a testament to how we can ‘figure it out’ rather than ‘fight’ when we want to interact with each other.”
The ISS was first proposed after the Cold War, illustrating a new spirit of cooperation between space race rivals Russia and the United States.
While many ties between Russia and the West have been severed due to Moscow’s war in Ukraine, cooperation has continued aboard the space station.
“The history of human spaceflight is, above all, the space race,” Lionel Suchet of the French space agency CNES told AFP.
“This is a very interesting moment in the evolution of space exploration,” said Suchet, who coordinated several early ISS projects after witnessing the deorbiting of its predecessor, the Mir space station, in 2001.
Back to Earth
However, the ISS is aging and its equipment is obsolete.
NASA announced last year that it had selected Elon Musk’s SpaceX to build a vehicle that can push the station back into Earth’s atmosphere in 2030, where it will disintegrate.
“This large rocket engine will slow down the ISS and allow it to have a precise re-entry over the Pacific Ocean, away from land, people or any other potential danger,” Horack explained.
Several spacecraft and telescopes, including Mir, have suffered a similar fate, crashing into an isolated spot in the ocean called Point Nemo.
After 2030, the only space station orbiting Earth will be China’s Tiangong.
Looking ahead, the United States will focus more on space stations built and operated by private companies.
“We are entering an era in which space stations have a much more commercial dimension,” similar to what has already happened with rockets and satellites, Horack said.
National space agencies would then have to pay these companies to stay on board.
Several companies, including Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin and Axiom Space, are already working on plans to build the first commercial space station.
Suchet highlighted that “the business model will remain largely institutional because countries are always interested in sending astronauts to low Earth orbit.”
Scientific research and exploration also remains a “goal of all humanity,” he added, pointing to treaties that govern how nations are supposed to act in space.
It remains to be seen whether these treaties will hold once humans reach the Moon (the US and China have plans to build lunar bases).
‘Pretty sad’
For Horack, the end of the ISS could be considered “quite sad.”
His children “had been going out to the backyard all their lives to watch the ISS fly over.”
But the end of this era will mark the beginning of another, he added.
“We must grow as human beings in our ability to travel to space, in our exploration of space, and in the use of space to generate social, economic, educational and quality of life outcomes for all people everywhere.”
In closing, he quoted the former director of the European Space Agency, Jean-Jacques Dordain: “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.”