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Episode: What will happen after the International Space Station?

Author: BBC World Service
Duration: 00:22:59

Episode Shownotes

The International Space Station will be decommissioned in 2030 and crash down into the Pacific Ocean, ending more than three decades of international cooperation. Launched in the wake of the Cold War, the ISS is seen as a triumph of global diplomacy between the US, Russia and other nations. Its

demise will mark the end of an era.Nasa has awarded contracts to commercial companies to develop potential successors to the ISS, and maintain a U.S. presence in low earth orbit. Meanwhile Russia and India have said they plan to launch their own individual stations, and China has already got its own space station, Tiangong. As the era of the International Space Station nears its end, this week on The Inquiry, we’re asking ‘What will happen after the International Space Station?’ Presenter: Tanya Beckett Producer: Matt Toulson Researcher: Kirsteen Knight Editor: Tara McDermott Technical Operator: Ben HoughtonContributors: Jennifer Levasseur, Museum Curator at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum, Washington D.C., USMark McCaughrean, former Senior Advisor for Science & Exploration at the European Space Agency and astronomer at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy, Heidelberg, GermanyMai'a Cross, Professor of political science at Northeastern University, and director for the Center for International Affairs and World Cultures, Massachusetts, USWendy Whitman Cobb, Professor of strategy and security studies at the School of Advanced Air and Space Studies, Alabama, USCREDIT: State of the Union address, 1984; Courtesy Ronald Reagan Presidential Library

Full Transcript

00:00:32 Speaker_06
This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Hello, this is Jackie Leonard from the Global News Podcast. Let me tell you about our annual review of the happiest news stories of 2024. From the work of thousands to raise the magnificent Notre Dame Cathedral from the ashes, to the astonishing success of the chopsticks maneuver to catch a rocket booster as it came back to earth, to the young Irish rappers who went massively viral with an absolute banger of a tune. The Happy Pod. Just search for the Global News Podcast wherever you get your BBC podcasts.

00:00:46 Speaker_06
Welcome to The Inquiry with me, Tanya Beckett, from the BBC World Service. One question, four expert witnesses and an answer. In a few short years, one of the greatest feats of scientific cooperation the world has ever seen will come to the end of its life.

00:01:04 Speaker_06
The International Space Station will fall dramatically from the sky dropping 400 kilometers through the clouds.

00:01:15 Speaker_06
It will burn up and break into fragments as it hits the Earth's atmosphere and finally crash into the depths of the Pacific Ocean.

00:01:27 Speaker_06
Launched in the wake of the Cold War in 1998 as a triumph of global diplomacy and collaboration, the demise of the International Space Station will mark the end of an era. Its achievements range from scientific breakthroughs on medicine and disease to monitoring climate change.

00:01:43 Speaker_06
Orbiting the Earth every hour and a half for nearly three decades, the ISS has been a reliable constant in our lives.

00:01:53 Speaker_06
In the time it takes you to listen to this 23-minute programme, the ISS will travel as far as the distance between London and Buenos Aires. But nearly 30 years after it went into orbit, its structures are weakening, and now it has just six years left on the clock.

00:02:14 Speaker_00
This week on The Enquiry, we're asking, what will happen after the International Space Station? Part One, Liftoff. The International Space Station is always moving around the Earth. It orbits very rapidly. It takes about 90

00:02:27 Speaker_06
minutes or so for it to make a single orbit. It's going about 17,500 miles per hour.

00:02:36 Speaker_00
Dr. Jennifer Lavassa is a museum curator at the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum. It's incredibly bright.

00:02:46 Speaker_06
If the angle of the sun is just right, you can see it quite clearly. It's traveling very consistently. It does not blink and that's how you know that it's not an airplane.

00:02:57 Speaker_00
In 1942, German military engineers developed the first missile capable of reaching space, at that time for the purposes of warfare.

00:03:13 Speaker_06
The development of the V2 rocket, which of course could travel great distances, was really the beginning of the story of the capability of humans reaching orbit. And of course, you can't have a space station unless you can reach orbit. So this is the beginning of that capability.

00:03:23 Speaker_06
After World War II came four decades of the Cold War, which overshadowed any prospect of international collaboration to build a space station to orbit Earth.

00:03:38 Speaker_06
Instead, America and Russia diverted their ideas and the two entered a race to prove technical superiority by putting the first man on the moon, a race that was won by the United States in 1969. Then, in the 1970s, both Russia and America sent space stations into orbit.

00:03:53 Speaker_06
But when the US Skylab was decommissioned in 1979, America developed greater ambitions.

00:04:02 Speaker_01
In 1984, President Ronald Reagan gave America's space agency, NASA, the go-ahead for a bold new project. Tonight I am directing NASA to develop a permanently manned space station and to do it within a decade.

00:04:18 Speaker_06
NASA will invite other countries to participate so we can strengthen peace, build prosperity and expand freedom for all who share our goals. President Reagan was not to guess that a few short years later one of those other countries would be Russia.

00:04:34 Speaker_00
But in 1989 came the collapse of the Soviet Union. And from a diplomatic perspective, that changed everything.

00:04:46 Speaker_00
If the United States had not stepped in at that point and brought Russia into this project of what became the International Space Station, it seems unlikely that Russia's space program would have survived that period. So this political alliance, but also a technical alliance in around 1994,

00:04:57 Speaker_06
really becomes the beginning of what we think of as the International Space Station programme.

00:05:09 Speaker_00
What emerged was an ambitious plan to create a vast international scientific platform to orbit the Earth, drawing on the resources of America, Russia, Europe, Japan and Canada.

00:05:17 Speaker_00
Nothing like this had ever been conceived of before and so this ability to be able to

00:05:41 Speaker_06
do things from different places around the globe, basically to have your sort of ground based equipment, your ground based personnel, to work together to have people flying from one country to the next to carry out these technical collaborations and to share that information is unparalleled. And certainly at this point, it's hard to imagine it being repeated anytime in the near future. By the mid-90s, ideas were starting to come together as to how the project would work.

00:06:00 Speaker_00
There would be the US orbital system, within which there would be Japanese and European modules, and the Russian orbital system.

00:06:04 Speaker_00
With the politics dealt with, then came the question of the physical structure. It coalesced under this idea that there would be this large

00:06:24 Speaker_00
central trust segment, we think of it like a backbone of a human body, that would then be the attachment point for all of the habitable modules that could be attached together, but also the solar energy consuming solar panels that would need to be in place in order to supply power to the station itself. The idea of getting things into orbit is very expensive.

00:06:34 Speaker_00
So there needed to be a way of getting them there. You have rockets, you have the space shuttle that can carry these modules there. And of course, you have to have the ability to continue this process and continue to rotate crew.

00:06:51 Speaker_02
And so there's this incredible infrastructure that needs to exist on the ground to be able to support that. Russia built the first module of the ISS and launched it in 1998 from Kazakhstan.

00:07:00 Speaker_06
Liftoff of the Proton rocket and the Zarya control module, the first component of the International Space Station heading toward orbit.

00:07:09 Speaker_00
The first American module was launched on the 4th of December the same year. Since then, multiple modules and equipment have been added onto the station.

00:07:20 Speaker_00
This development of this infrastructure really builds up through the 1990s and even into the 2000s, until really about the end of the space shuttle program in 2011, where things become very static.

00:07:29 Speaker_06
But the size of the station in 2011 is still the same as it is today, which we roughly like to think of as about the size of a football pitch.

00:07:39 Speaker_03
But with so much technical expertise and countries involved, how does it all function? Part 2 In Orbit My name is Mark McCorquan.

00:07:53 Speaker_06
I'm the former Senior Advisor for Science and Exploration at the European Space Agency. I'm now an astronomer at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg. The space station plays host to around seven crew members at any time.

00:08:09 Speaker_03
Astronaut crews come from the participating countries, the US, Russia, Japan, Canada and European nations, and their expeditions usually last about six months.

00:08:18 Speaker_03
Many of the people might be biologists, they might be geologists, oceanographers, all sorts, and many of them will actually have multiple degrees and multiple subjects.

00:08:30 Speaker_03
These days it's also possible just to be a tourist and buy your way onto the space station, but the great majority who've been there over the last more than 20 years that the space station has been continuously occupied

00:08:43 Speaker_06
have been selected by agencies like ESA, NASA, the Japanese Space Agency and by Russian space agency Roscosmos. And they're typically scientific, engineering and flying professionals.

00:08:55 Speaker_03
Typically, astronauts travel to the space station via SpaceX's Crew Dragon or the Russian Soyuz capsule. So how long does it take to get to the space station?

00:09:03 Speaker_03
takes anywhere from half a day to several days, depending on how the docking is working and how the rendezvous works out.

00:09:14 Speaker_03
Of course, you get launched from the ground and the space station is in orbit and it's all timed so that you arrive at the space station after having gone around the earth a bit. So yeah, it can take a while.

00:09:24 Speaker_03
So you might actually be on a very small spacecraft for up to a couple of days before arriving at the space station. And that's probably a little bit uncomfortable because you're really just locked in a seat

00:09:31 Speaker_06
You can now get out in some of the launchers which go up there. But with the Soyuz, for example, if you go up on that, then that's it. You're in that seat for quite a long time.

00:09:38 Speaker_03
And you have to get on well together because you're living in very confined circumstances, aren't you?

00:09:54 Speaker_03
To be selected as an astronaut in the first place, you've definitely got a pretty calm, serious personality who isn't going to go off the handle just because somebody leaves the bathroom door open, for example. The one thing they can't do is shower. There is no shower on board the ISS. Oh, that sounds unfortunate. It is for a six-month mission or even a year in some of the longest cases.

00:10:04 Speaker_03
So everything's done with wet wipes. And again, that may challenge you and your interpersonal relations if that's not done properly. Essentially, one of the good things about the ISS is that it's actually quite close to Earth.

00:10:14 Speaker_03
So fresh food comes up fairly often. It's not all packet food. Certain things can't be eaten on board.

00:10:25 Speaker_06
For example, you wouldn't want to be handing a croissant around on board the ISS because the crumbs will get absolutely everywhere. So that's a really, it's a big no-no, eating foods which are going to create a problem on board. When it comes to getting rest, astronauts strap themselves into sleeping bags that are attached to the wall to stop them floating around.

00:10:42 Speaker_06
But if they do manage to get some shut-eye, there's still a negative impact on their bodies from living in space. Are there long-term impacts of being in space for that long?

00:10:52 Speaker_03
Do people say when they get older, for example, that they notice certain things that have deteriorated earlier as a result? There are definitely impacts.

00:11:03 Speaker_03
For example, there are things to do with muscle wasting, bone density decreases. There are issues to do with fluid resettling inside the body.

00:11:13 Speaker_06
And one of the issues there, for example, is that the fluid pressure can build up behind the eyes and change how your vision works in space.

00:11:28 Speaker_03
Much of the studies done on the space station are aimed at understanding what would happen to the human body if we were to explore destinations further afield in space and stay there for any period of time, for example the Moon or even Mars. Many of these things get better when you come back to Earth, but it takes time.

00:11:38 Speaker_03
And the kind of rule of thumb is that for every day you spend on the space station, it takes you a day to recover when you come back down. So a six-month mission is then followed by six months of full recovery. Those are things which are fixable, if you like, by being back on Earth.

00:11:53 Speaker_03
But one of the big questions is, are there very long-term impacts which are not repairable? And one of the things which is actually a bit difficult to investigate on the space station is the effects of radiation.

00:12:06 Speaker_03
So high-energy particles coming from the Sun, hitting astronauts, creating damage in cells. Where the ISS is, it's actually inside what are called the Van Allen belts.

00:12:17 Speaker_03
So belts which are to do with the Earth's magnetic field. That actually protects the astronauts from these particles.

00:12:29 Speaker_06
But going to the Moon and spending months or years there and long flights to Mars, that's a much bigger issue. So there are experiments done on long-term degenerative problems with being in space.

00:12:50 Speaker_05
But with so much conflict on Earth, how will nations be able to join together to make progress on exploring space? Time for our next expert witness.

00:12:54 Speaker_05
Hello, this is Jackie Leonard from the Global News Podcast. Let me tell you about our annual review of the happiest news stories of 2024.

00:13:04 Speaker_05
From the work of thousands to raise the magnificent Notre Dame Cathedral from the ashes, to the astonishing success of the chopsticks maneuver to catch a rocket booster as it came back to earth, to the young Irish rappers who went massively viral with an absolute banger of a tune. The Happy Pod.

00:13:18 Speaker_05
Just search for the Global News Podcast wherever you get your BBC podcasts. Part Three Space Diplomacy

00:13:42 Speaker_06
The overarching intergovernmental agreement that was signed in 1998 at the inception of the International Space Station has embedded within it a spirit of cooperation.

00:13:54 Speaker_06
All parties involved are committed to do what they can to maintain the integrity of the space station, meaning, for example, the materials, the scientific experiments and the visits by astronauts. It's intergovernmental in the sense that

00:14:09 Speaker_07
It makes every effort to enable the signing parties to maintain their own kind of sovereignty, so to speak, over the materials and the modules that they are responsible for, that they paid for and that they created. Maya Cross is Professor of Political Science at Northeastern University in America, as well as Director for the Centre for International Affairs and World Cultures.

00:14:23 Speaker_06
And if you think of it spatially in the modules of the ISS,

00:14:33 Speaker_07
National law for the United States, for example, applies in the US part of the ISS, and Russian law applies in the Russian part of the ISS. So this is kind of the more tangible manifestation of the way this agreement plays out legally.

00:14:50 Speaker_07
This raised an awkward dilemma when, in February 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine, straining diplomatic relations with both Europe and America.

00:15:06 Speaker_07
At a certain point shortly after the invasion, Roscosmos actually threatened to immediately withdraw from the ISS and leave the American astronaut who was in orbit there, and even went so far as to threaten to actually break apart the ISS. So on some level, this was alarming and it was very, very concerning for the future of the ISS. But at this stage, Russia did not pull out.

00:15:33 Speaker_07
For the scientists involved, for the astronauts, for those who are really part of the space community, there was a sense that there wasn't a real threat ultimately to the ISS because the astronauts that are on the ISS have quite a bit of control in terms of how they sort of move forward with the day-to-day.

00:15:44 Speaker_07
And if it really came down to it, they would actually have the wherewithal to keep the projects going, even if they received orders from Earth to stop cooperating.

00:15:52 Speaker_07
So there was little reason to expect that it would be impacted by war on Earth. But this, says our third expert witness, is an example of where political and scientific diplomacy can exist on two separate tracks.

00:16:08 Speaker_06
Right to this day, since Russia's invasion of Ukraine, activities on the ISS have continued as usual. Cooperation has continued, scientific experiments have continued.

00:16:17 Speaker_07
So it really shows that even when there is war on Earth, Space diplomacy can maintain cooperation on the International Space Station.

00:16:32 Speaker_07
But Russia's contract ends in 2028, which, as we know, is before the space station will be taken out of orbit.

00:16:37 Speaker_06
And at that point, geopolitics may well loom large again in terms of what happens next.

00:16:53 Speaker_06
So far, it looks like diplomatic conflict on Earth will play out in space, as a handful of countries, China, Russia, India and the United States, look to carve their own paths in the cosmos. The last thing any of us would want to see is the development of two blocks of space exploration, one led by the United States and one led by China.

00:17:08 Speaker_07
That could potentially be dangerous.

00:17:18 Speaker_07
I think it's really important to continue the track record that's been in place for many decades of reaching across borders, trying to find commonality, cooperating on space exploration when possible, cooperating in the name of science and for the good of humanity.

00:17:32 Speaker_07
And really we need these advancements in space in order to tackle climate change, which is the greatest challenge that we face on Earth in the coming decades. In the immediate term, the prospect of Russia withdrawing from the ISS space programme has led to NASA looking to the private sector for solutions.

00:17:58 Speaker_06
In 2020, Elon Musk's SpaceX, which has already been delivering cargo to the space station for over a decade, became the first private company to transport astronauts to the ISS. But the commercial sector has ambitions beyond serving government-led projects.

00:18:11 Speaker_06
There are plans to make space an affordable tourist destination, and there are also some much loftier goals. Time for our final expert witness. Part 4, Commercial Space

00:18:30 Speaker_03
The International Space Station is definitely nearing the end of its lifetime. It started to be designed in the 1980s.

00:18:35 Speaker_08
So we're looking at a space station that is several decades old right now. And operating in space is not an easy thing to be exposed to in terms of debris, radiation, the harshness of the space environment.

00:18:45 Speaker_08
Wendy Whitman Cobb is a professor of strategy and security studies at the School of Advanced Air and Space Studies in Alabama, USA.

00:18:53 Speaker_06
In fact, about a year and a half, two years ago, the Canada arm on the ISS, they found a hole in it from a piece of debris that had gone through it.

00:19:03 Speaker_08
So that just shows you how much it's being exposed to in that space environment. So there is certainly a limit to how useful the ISS can be as it nears the end of its lifetime. The first challenge to moving on beyond the space station is its decommissioning.

00:19:15 Speaker_08
As we've said, the Russian segment of the ISS controls the engines and propulsions for the whole station.

00:19:22 Speaker_06
So without Moscow's cooperation, it could make it very difficult to carry out the original plan to bring the station back inside the Earth's atmosphere.

00:19:34 Speaker_06
If the Russians say we are not going to use our engines to de-orbit the ISS, There's nothing that the other partner countries can really do to make them do it.

00:19:43 Speaker_08
And so what NASA has been looking at in the past year or so are alternative arrangements. And so recently they just let out a contract to SpaceX to develop a propulsion module that can be attached to the ISS that would assist at least in deorbiting it.

00:19:59 Speaker_08
But this is just the start of governments partnering with private firms in space.

00:20:11 Speaker_06
After the ISS is deorbited, decommissioned, we're likely to see a generation of commercial alternatives to potentially replace the space station.

00:20:16 Speaker_08
Instead of having the space shuttle take astronauts to and from the space station or the Russia's Soyuz. We've seen commercial providers like SpaceX step up and fill that gap. So what we're likely to see happen and what NASA is interested in supporting are commercial alternatives.

00:20:32 Speaker_08
In December 2021, NASA awarded contracts to three U.S.

00:20:43 Speaker_06
companies to develop designs for space stations in a bid to find the successor to the ISS and keep the U.S. present in low Earth orbit. One of these designs is a joint venture called Orbital Reef, a space station that will be a destination for astronauts and tourists, also backed by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.

00:20:57 Speaker_06
NASA is also backing Starlab, an orbiting space habitat for humans which is being co-designed by airplane company Airbus.

00:21:09 Speaker_06
Meanwhile, China's private space sector is burgeoning. But commercial ambitions extend beyond orbiting Earth to transporting Earthlings to inhabit other planets.

00:21:22 Speaker_06
Their big motivation, guiding motivation, is sort of being able to spread out to Mars first, but obviously elsewhere in the future.

00:21:32 Speaker_08
to ensure the survival of humanity.

00:21:43 Speaker_08
Certainly, if you look at any of the writing from or about Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos, who founded Blue Origin, they have been very inspired by science fiction, by their ambitions and dreams for the future. And so SpaceX in particular wants to make life multi-planetary should something happen to Earth.

00:22:02 Speaker_08
Jeff Bezos's Blue Origin has been very motivated by essentially creating industry and moving industry off Earth so that we can save Earth and essentially keep it as a preserve or an international park, so to speak. So I think in the case of these two companies in particular, there's not just a profit motive, but also a very big idealistic

00:22:17 Speaker_08
endeavor goal, so to speak, of what they want the future of humanity to look like.

00:22:38 Speaker_06
These are bold visions which are, in part, an answer to our question, what will happen after the International Space Station? In six years, the ISS will be towed out of orbit.

00:22:50 Speaker_06
What will replace it is a mixture of public and private partnerships to build space stations that will allow for not only the continuation of scientific research, but also the growing market in affordable space travel for tourists. The long-term goal, though, is to build communities in space as an alternative to living on Earth.

00:23:05 Speaker_06
Our inability to live sustainably on Earth is leading us to other realms. In the meantime, the inescapable reality is that the current era of international space diplomacy has come to an end.

00:23:17 Speaker_06
And that when we move to space, the risk is that we will take our earthly conflicts with us. unless the endless possibilities of space offer us a whole new perspective on life.

00:23:41 Speaker_07
People who are lucky enough to go, astronauts, really experience this kind of shift in mindset where they can see Earth and how small it is, how fragile and beautiful, and realize that at the end of the day, it's about everybody. And humanity should, on some level, pursue scientific goals and exploration and technological breakthroughs as one species.

00:24:10 Speaker_06
This inquiry was presented by me, Tanya Beckett, produced by Matt Tolson, the researcher was Kirsteen Knight, it was edited by Tara McDermott, and the studio manager is Ben Houghton. Hello, this is Jackie Leonard from the Global News Podcast. Let me tell you about our annual review of the happiest news stories of 2024.

00:24:31 Speaker_05
From the work of thousands to raise the magnificent Notre Dame Cathedral from the ashes, to the astonishing success of the chopsticks maneuver to catch a rocket booster as it came back to earth, to the young Irish rappers who went massively viral with an absolute banger of a tune. The Happy Pod. Just search for the Global News Podcast wherever you get your BBC podcasts.