LThe International Space Station (ISS) is the largest, most complex and most important piece of space infrastructure ever deployed, and one of the most incredible technical achievements in human history. It is the result of an international diplomatic initiative reconciling the Western and Eastern worlds in space by combining the two space stations previously planned separately by each party – Space Station Freedom and Mir 2 – involving five major partners: the United States, Europe, Japan, Canada and Russia.
The result is a 450-ton structure involving tens of thousands of people working together on three continents for several decades. It took two decades to develop and assemble it in orbit, and it has been permanently occupied for twenty years by successive crews, all at a cost of more than 100 billion dollars (about 93 billion euros) to date.
The major goals of the ISS have been achieved: international cooperation has been put into practice on a daily basis for decades of continuous operations, providing solutions to problems encountered in space and on Earth; scientific and technical experiments are continuously conducted inside and outside the station; astronauts live and work continuously and safely on board the station, maintaining and repairing it, conducting experiments and recycling resources as much as possible.
An unnecessary loss for the future
Given the aging of the ISS, the high budgets required to continue its operation, and the prospect of less expensive private alternatives, the partners are considering ceasing operations of this station by the end of the decade. The question then becomes what to do with it after 2030, with the understanding that the answer to this question must be determined now in order to prepare, finance, and implement the solution that will be chosen by the partners. Doing nothing is impossible since the ISS cannot remain unattended in its current orbit, which would lead to an uncontrolled and potentially very dangerous re-entry into the atmosphere within a few years. Founded Based on previous experiments of re-entry of the Skylab, Salyut and Mir stations, the current plan is to deorbit the ISS in a controlled manner. To this end, a call for tenders for a “deorbit stage” was launched by NASA, which announced on June 26 that it had entrusted its production to Elon Musk’s company SpaceX, for an amount of 843 million dollars, almost 790 million euros.
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