The final plunge

After more than a decade of construction,it is nearing completion and finally has a full crew of six astronauts. The last components should be installed by the end of next year. And then? “In the first quarter of 2016,we’ll prep and de-orbit the spacecraft,” says NASA’s space station program manager,Michael Suffredini.

That’s a polite way of saying that NASA will make the space station fall back into the atmosphere,where it will turn into a fireball and then crash into the Pacific Ocean. It’ll be a controlled reentry,to ensure that it doesn’t take out a major city. But it’ll be destroyed as surely as a Lego palace obliterated by the sweeping arm of a suddenly bored kid.

This,at least,is NASA’s plan,pending a change in policy. There’s no long-term funding on the books for international space station operations beyond 2015.

Suffredini raised some eyebrows when,at a public hearing last month,he declared flatly that the plan is to de-orbit the station in 2016. He addressed his comments to a panel chaired by former aerospace executive Norman Augustine that is charged by the Obama administration with reviewing the entire human spaceflight program. Everything is on the table—missions,goals,rocket design. And right there in the mix is this big,fancy space laboratory circling the Earth from 220 miles up.

The station’s cost is both a liability and,paradoxically,a virtue. A figure commonly associated with the ISS is that it will ultimately cost the United States and its international partners about $100 billion. That may add to the political pressure to keep the laboratory in orbit rather than seeing it plunging back to Earth so soon after completion.

“If we’ve spent a hundred billion dollars,I don’t think we want to shut it down in 2015,” Sen. Bill Nelson,D-Fla.,told Augustine’s committee.

Suffredini agrees. “My opinion is it would be a travesty to de-orbit this thing,” he said. “If we get rid of this darned thing in 2015,we’re going to cede our leadership in human exploration.”

NASA has a strategy built on President George W. Bush’s Vision for Space Exploration,of which a return to the moon is the next great leap. The space station’s defenders say it can provide essential research on long-duration spaceflight.

Suffredini argues that any long-term exploration of the universe requires an initial step of learning how to survive in space. The best place to do that is close to the Earth,he said. The space station sticks to low Earth orbit. “It’s also teaching us how to work together as a world,as a planet,” he said.

Critics have long derided the orbiting laboratory as a boondoggle. Originally called Space Station Freedom during the Reagan years,it became the international space station when the United States lured Russia into a partnership in 1993,agreeing to alter the orbit of the station to make it pass over the Russian-run space complex in Kazakhstan. That agreement helped keep Russian scientists and engineers employed at a time when the United States feared they would become rogue agents in a chaotic world.

The rap on the space station has always been that it was built primarily to give the space shuttle somewhere to go. Now,with the shuttle being retired at the end of 2010,the station is on the spot. US astronauts will be able to reach the station only by getting rides on Russia’s Soyuz spacecraft.

A prominent critic of human spaceflight,physicist Robert Park of the University of Maryland,argues that the station fundamentally lacks a mission.

David Leckrone,senior project scientist for the Hubble Space Telescope,says the station is underutilised and fears that NASA measures its value solely in terms of how it might advance the long-term “Exploration” agenda of returning to the moon,with basic science research as an afterthought.1 “Whether it was a great investment or not to begin with,having made that investment,I think it’s imperative for the United States to extract value—real,honest-to-God scientific value—out of that investment,” Leckrone said.

Park has a different suggestion: “Give it to China. Let them support the damn thing.”