One day I fear I’ll have to answer to Katherine — or to her children — about how we let this slip away …
The international space station is by far the largest spacecraft ever built by earthlings. Circling the Earth every 90 minutes, it often passes over North America and is visible from the ground when night has fallen but the station, up high, is still bathed in sunlight.
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 T. 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.
The ISS is not a perfect endeavor. But it’s there, and it’s a small sign that we’re still interested in something bigger than our (literally) mundane concerns. It’s an appeal to our better natures, to our ideals — and deciding it doesn’t fit into a given year’s budget cycle shows the flip side to government programs that never seem to die: some things you can’t just give up on for a little while then pick up again when you’re ready.
Unmanned probes are fine, even clever. Manned space missions are flashy. But an orbiting habitat is … humanity’s toe-hold in space. But not nearly important as some Congresscritter’s district’s big defense contract, I guess.
I think of the big “spinning wheel” space stations from SF novels of my youth — or, heck, from 2001: A Space Odyssey — and reading this makes me very sad.
Didn’t they *just* finish it this year? I do not understand how you can spend longer building something than you will spend actually using it.
It actually finishes up (per the article) next year.
Solely from an investment standpoint, it’s an awful decision.
Maybe we can sell it to the Chinese.
Then later they can rent space to us…
Wait a minute. Chinese repairs. Chinese improvements. Chinese quality.
Never mind.
The frightening thing is that most people don’t understand that we have to find a way off this Rock. Even if we don’t kill us- pollution, war, drought etc- at some point there will be a natuaral disaster- super volcano, asteroid etc- that will be our ‘boundary event’. We need to get out there, even if it is just to come back later.
Are they gonna do some science now? ‘Cause I was kinda hoping they’d do some science.
Still, I’ll be sad on several levels to see it go into the ocean. For one thing, it might kill some fish, and we’re already doing enough of that. This is one boondoggle I’d be happy to see given to private industry with the agreement that they can have it if they just take over the maintenance. Hopefully by 2016 commercial space flight will be ready for that.
Doubtless the ISS hasn’t been handled well as a program, as a coherent mission, as a cooperative venture, as a scientific platform, or as much of anything. Blame politics and geopolitics and shortsightedness on several fronts.
That said, I’m not ready to hand it over to any private industry yet.