The End Of The International Space Station

0:07Right now, it's above the Indian Ocean, traveling over 17 ,000 miles per hour and flying 260 miles above the surface of the Earth. The International Space Station has been a mainstay in the sky for 25 years. It's played host to astronauts from around the world and functions as a low-gravity laboratory, helping to push science forward. But its time in the sky is coming to an end. NASA plans to deorbit the station, guiding it into the Pacific Ocean. What will fill that void? I'm Jen Moyte. You're listening to the 1A Podcast. We talk about that and more after this short break. Stay with us.

0:47Let's launch into the conversation with our guest. John Horak is a professor, the vice president of research, and Neil Armstrong's chair in aerospace policy at The Ohio State University. John, thanks for joining us. Jen, thanks for having me. It's good to be here. I appreciate it. Now, many of us have heard of the International Space Station. We see it mentioned on social media. When someone here does a Vulcan salute after an actor from Star Trek dies, It might be the destination for a disastrous shuttle launch that goes viral. But it's important enough to have operated continuously in low orbit for some 25 years.

1:20John, what are the primary functions of the ISS? Well, one function is to perform cutting-edge research in space. There's certain things you just can't do on the ground, no matter how much money you spend in your laboratory, including turning gravity down to almost zero. We call it microgravity. It's a millionth of the amount of gravity you have on the ground. and gravity masks a lot of processes that go on on the ground and you can learn a lot by going to a new laboratory where you can kind of turn the knob up and down in a way you can't do on the ground second thing it's probably one of the engineering marvels in history every time i see it fly over i feel like i'm looking at you know the hanging gardens of babylon or the pyramids of giza or the mounds of cahokia or you know the great wall of china it's just one of those most amazing technological, collaborative human accomplishments that kind of boggles the mind.

2:16And to see it fly over is super inspirational. And we're talking about essentially a football field-sized, continuously operating research lab and living space in low orbit. It's staffed by people from all over the world. What does this represent for the international spacefaring community and the global population as a whole. Yeah, so I believe it's both a demonstration of what can be done when we put our minds to it, because, you know, I have a saying that if it happens, it must be possible. And this idea that we could take, you know, multiple nations and multiple cultures and multiple languages and build almost a cathedral, not in a religious sense, of course, but a cathedral in space that is a piece of all of us.

2:59And the logistics of doing that are just extremely hard. I mean, none of the pieces of the space station, it took over 40 launches of the shuttle and other vehicles to assemble it in orbit. It's not like we put it together on the ground and then took it apart and put it back together in space. These things never saw each other. These pieces never saw each other until they got to orbit, racing around the earth at 17 ,500 miles an hour. And the fact that we have been able to collaborate globally and have people on board 24-7, 365 since November of 2000, kind of points away to how perhaps we should be working together and figuring things out instead of fighting things out and using space as a tool to do that.

3:41Well, as you said, it took multiple governments collaborating together to put the ISS into orbit piece by piece. It took more than a decade. Now, the first ISS component, Zarya, launched from Kazakhstan in 1998, and it was designed to provide fuel storage, battery power, and docking capability for vehicles coming from Earth to continue construction. Main engine start, six engines up and running. And liftoff. Liftoff of the Proton rocket and the Zarya control module. The International Space Station is underway. The Proton building up thrust, good roll and pitch program, according to flight controllers.

4:19The first component of the International Space Station heading toward orbit. John, as you know, the space race was famously less a friendly competition and more of a geopolitical conflict between two of the world's superpowers, the U.S. and Russia. To go from that to what you call a monument to human cooperation is a huge shift. How did this idea for the ISS come about? Well, actually, the ideas for collaboration between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, the then-Soviet Union, actually date all the way back to the Kennedy administration. So at the same time that President Kennedy was saying, we choose to go to the moon and we should land a person on the moon and return them safely by the end of the decade.

5:01There were internal discussions in the government about whether we should try to do this in collaboration with the Soviets, you know, and that this compete or collaborate debate was going on. Eventually what happened, of course, we all know that Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin landed on the moon on Apollo 11. We visited the moon six separate times, successful landings in addition to Apollo 8 and Apollo 10 and Apollo 13, which was unsuccessful to land. But by 1975, we actually flew the Apollo Soyuz mission with the Soviets, where there's an iconic picture of Tom Stafford and Alexei Leonov shaking hands through the portal.

5:39And these are two guys that trained and lived their whole lives basically to learn how to kill each other more dead faster and to see them not only collaborate, cooperate, meet in space, but then become true lifelong friends is just another example. So this has been working for a long time. And of course, after the United States began to work on space station freedom, and then the Soviet Union had the political change where the Soviet Union came apart, and we offered the opportunity together collaboratively with European partners, Canadian partners, Japanese partners to work with the Russians in building the International Space Station.

6:18And so that's how you heard the voice of Rob Navy, a former NASA spokesperson, talk about the Zarya launch in 1998. That's how this all got going was this idea that maybe we can build on the collaboration that had occurred during Apollo Soyuz and build a truly international space station. Why not just have an American space station? Why did the station have to be international? Well, there's a lot of reasons for that. One is that space in the United States has always been a tool that the United States has for foreign and domestic policy. It's a way in which we can learn more about and work collaboratively and productively with allies and other countries who wish to partner with the United States.

7:05It's an extremely complicated and expensive endeavor. And different partners have different things to bring to the program. I'm thinking about the Canadians at the moment because they have tremendous expertise in space robotics. You might remember the early shuttle days, the payload bay door opens and you see the robot arm and it says Canada on it. That's expertise we want to have in our program because it's world class. And so I guess I'll finish by saying that space is something that everybody is interested in. I mean, and the challenges and opportunities that space brings to either solve problems or take advantage of opportunities, those problems and opportunities don't respect national borders.

7:47You know, things like the COVID virus was one example. Perhaps space didn't play a great role in that. But, you know, monitoring the oceans and understanding weather patterns and hurricanes and floods, You know, these kinds of things just don't obey political boundaries. And when you fly in space, I have not flown, but those who fly clearly point out, you know, you don't see the lines that are on the map on the ground on the Earth. Yeah. What role has the ISS played in scientific discovery, John? so the iss has played a very interesting role in foundational scientific discovery across domains that include material science biotechnology learning more about the human body how we how we can live and work in extreme environments a couple of examples that i can point to now for example you we are we are learning how to grow artificial retinas in space basically these light-sensitive proteins that can be grown on very precise scaffolds that someday can restore sight for people who lose their sight.

8:50We have flown cancer drugs in space where the crystallization of the active protein in that drug or the active ingredient in that drug, we learned how that protein folds in different ways in space, replicating that now on the ground to change how that drug is formulated, how it can be delivered, how to improve patient outcomes. And then very, very interesting things in terms of material science about how to grow ultra-pure optical fibers, how to grow crystals and other semiconductor materials for future computers. You know, and research for me is the very first link in the value chain of prosperity.

9:32And so the work that's being done on the ISS today and the knowledge that we're generating gets driven into the economy and enriches the lives of every person on Earth. What is it about the conditions in space that make these sorts of scientific advancements possible? Okay, well, I referred to one earlier, and that is the reduction, extreme reduction of gravity. So, you know, you think about the bubbles in your soft drink. They rise to the top because the gas is less dense than the fluid. this doesn't happen in space so you don't get this separation that's one example the birthday candle that's on on your birthday uh cake has a certain shape because of the heat is you know causes convection and so the shape the candle shape is sharp and tipped at the top when we go to space the the things that gravity either causes or masks on the ground go away and so by peeling away sort of the onion skin on nature to figure out what's really going on underneath the surface.

10:37Again, you can't do this anywhere on the ground. The other thing is that space has an ultra-pure vacuum. Very, very difficult in any vacuum chamber on the ground to reproduce the pristine conditions of space. And that is yet another variable, for example, that you can tune. The human body has been designed to thrive and work very well in 1G. And when you go to space, it's not a great thing to do to your body. So, for example, you will begin to shed calcium from your skeleton almost immediately at what can sometimes be an alarming rate. Well, this mirrors osteoporosis in many ways. And so perhaps in that case, space can be an environment where you can mimic certain things on the ground to learn how the body responds and then come back down and begin to build effective treatments for those people who endure those kinds of difficulties in their life.

11:34Well, John, the ISS has been continuously operating in Earth's low orbit for 25 years. It's set to be deorbited in 2030. What does that process look like? so anytime you de-orbit a spacecraft basically what you do is you slow it down and so what happens is the reason it stays in orbit is because it's moving fast enough 17 ,500 miles an hour to continue to fall around the earth and never impact so what we will do is we will attach and a contract has been let between nasa and spacex for a de-orbit module so basically you can think of this as a rocket engine that they will attach to the ISS. They'll fire the rocket engine in a direction to slow down the space station.

12:19And then what will happen is that this is done in a very precise way so that the space station then reenters over the Pacific Ocean, very, very far away from land, very, very far away from people. And it burns up in the atmosphere. Some parts will survive and impact the ocean, and they will rest for eternity at the bottom of the Pacific. We got this email from Tim who says, Why isn't it feasible to give the ISS a boost with the rocket to keep it in orbit? We hear figures that it costs so many hundreds of thousands of dollars to propel every single pound of material into orbit. Why not keep it up there, even if only to be reused for something else?

12:56John, why would we get rid of something that's so scientifically important and so symbolic as well? Well, it's a good question that Tim asks. And first of all, the station is getting old. And as you probably know, with an old house, an old car, an old washing machine, the costs of keeping it maintained and going just become difficult. And secondly, the technology that we have aboard the ISS is not what I would call state-of-the-art, at least relative to what we have on the ground today. So it's old technology. But the question remains, well, why not just boost it? And the answer to that question is that it's not about the distance.

13:32It's about how much energy it takes. And it would take significantly more energy, you know, to boost it to an orbit. I've had people say, let's take it to the moon. And I'm thinking, you have no idea how much energy that would take. And energy turns into dollars. And it takes, you know, almost, I would say, more energy to boost it to the moon than it would take to boost it to orbit. Roughly the same amount, depending on how you want to count it. And so for satellites that are, let's say, in geostationary orbit, very, very far above the Earth's surface where a lot more energy has been put into them, we dispose of them into graveyard orbits, and we just push them up and they go to a graveyard orbit, and that's how we take care of that.

14:16But we really don't have that opportunity in low Earth orbit. And so in low Earth orbit, what goes up must come down, and so we have to find a way to slow the space station down, diminish some of its kinetic energy so that it reenters the atmosphere. We've done this before. I worked on a satellite called the Gamma Ray Observatory. It was a 34 ,000-pound satellite, not nearly as big as the station, but pretty big. We deorbited that in 2000. The space station Mir, the Russian space station Mir, a complex station, was also deorbited into the Pacific. So people shouldn't worry about this in that sense.

14:50These things have been done before, and it will be done in a controlled and safe way. So what's going to take the ISS's place? Ah, that's a very good question. So over the past several decades, NASA and indeed many other federal, I'll call federal space agencies, space agencies in Japan, for example, or European Space Agency, have been relying more and more on the private sector and less on government-owned, government-operated, government-designed, funded programs. And we see this today in terms of how we supply cargo to the ISS as well as how we send people on SpaceX and then most recently on Boeing Starliner.

15:26So we're going to take a page out of that playbook. And NASA has issued over the past several years seed money to seed the development of privately owned commercially operated space stations that will function in low Earth orbit. and NASA and other national space agencies, as well as universities and private sector entities, can sort of buy time, buy missions, buy research aboard these stations on a commercial basis. And so you can envision a situation where NASA or another sovereign nation would say, we would like to buy a six-month mission for astronauts aboard a new commercial space station.

16:05It's not quite so simple that they just go to the website and sign up like you would buy an airplane ticket. But conceptually, you can think of it that way. And then this becomes an export for the United States, much like perhaps a Boeing aircraft or other high-technology product, we can begin to build and export space stations. Harry emails, I've followed the space program since my parents let me stay up to watch the first moon landing. I believe it's a huge mistake to privatize space exploration. I also think we should have updated our shuttle fleet instead of scrapping it. So to come with the sun setting on the ISS, what does it mean that private companies are stepping in to fill the void?

16:40That's just ahead.

16:46Before we get back to the International Space Station with Professor John Horak, I want to take a moment and explore what it's like to work aboard the ISS. We spoke earlier to someone with a unique perspective on the ISS because he had a unique perspective from the ISS. Terry Virts is a former United States Air Force pilot, NASA astronaut, space shuttle pilot, and International Space Station commander. He's also currently a Democratic candidate running for Senate in Texas. Let's listen. Terry, welcome back to 1A. It's so good to be back with you. So in your mind, what does the ISS represent? Not just for people who work in outer space, but for humanity as a whole.

17:28You know, the ISS was this amazing engineering achievement to build this massive million pound, you know, football-sized spaceship together with 15 different nations. it was a great scientific achievement and still is. Thousands and thousands of technical scientific papers have been written, human research. The science that's been done there has been amazing. But I think the biggest achievement is its international cooperation that it represents. You know, these 15 nations, including Russia, have come together and this partnership has lasted over 30 years. It was born at the end of the Cold War.

18:03So I think when historians look back 100 years from now, 200 years from now, this will be one of the great international relations achievements that we've had. What did assuming command at the ISS mean to you? It was an amazing honor. I mean, it's one of those things where I can't believe this is me. I can't believe I'm the commander of the ISS. It's a big deal. I mean, everybody, well, not everybody, but most human beings know what the ISS is. they can look up at night and see it fly over right after sunset or before sunrise. And it was just, it was an honor. And it was a big responsibility. Like I didn't want to screw it up.

18:42So I had to, you know, really take my job very seriously. And it was a lot of fun. I had a great crew. The astronauts I was with were just super experienced. They were very motivated. Having thousands of people back on Earth support me was a huge thing, you know, blessing. And so it was pretty cool. It's good work if you can get it. I highly recommend it. You boarded the ISS in 2014 alongside astronauts from Russia and Italy. What were those first few days like staying on the station? My first flight had been on the space shuttle years before that. And the first couple days were terrible. I had the worst headache I've ever had in my life.

19:23I just felt terrible ibuprofen was not helping and on the on the third morning it was like a light switch all of a sudden like my brain figured out what was happening and i said and i was fine like i was okay so when i went back in 2014 to the space station that time i flew on a russian soyuz capsule i was kind of worried like i was hoping that i didn't have that same problem that i had had and i didn't my body had remembered it so as soon as we got there it was uh in in one sense it was like coming home because I had been there before with the space shuttle. We actually finished building the space station on my shuttle flight.

19:58But on the other sense, thankfully, I didn't have the same raging headache that I had before. The problem I had the second time was back pain. Because you stretch out. I grew a few inches. I was finally six feet tall, which that was cool, but the back pain was not. So that took a few weeks to go away, But eventually it went away. What surprised you about life on board the station? I was worried that I wouldn't be able to sleep. And sleeping was not a problem, both on the space shuttle and also on the space station. It was very busy. In the astronaut office, everybody's attitude was space shuttle flights are usually two weeks.

20:40Those are sprints. You're go, go, go, go, go, go, go. You come back and land. But the space station flights, which are usually six months, are kind of marathons. It's busy, but man, on my flight, it was a 200-day sprint. It was like all day every day was busy. And the view just, surprise isn't a strong enough word. You can't imagine how beautiful it is. And it never got old. I think some astronauts are like, oh, there's Earth, and they just want to get back to work. I was exactly the opposite. I could have just spent all day staring out the window. It was so beautiful. Meanwhile, the ISS is a feat of engineering.

21:15It's also this off-world incubator for scientific innovation. What sorts of experiments or advancements were in the works while you were on board? When I was there, my crew, it was Expedition 42 and 43. We did 250 different experiments. So basically anything you can study in university here on Earth, we had experiments in space. Some of them were just like a small box you plug in and you never saw it again. The data went down to the scientists and you didn't know what was going on. One of them was something called rodent research. We had mice up there. NASA did this for years. It was a really important project for drug companies.

21:55There's one big thing outside called AMS, Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer. It's a particle detector that looks for exotic antimatter particles coming in from who knows where in the galaxy and the universe. and that was really cool. We didn't really have anything to do. The only thing we had to do was keep the space station running and it worked. In terms of like learning what the universe is made of, I thought that was a pretty cool experiment. So there's the scientific experimentation that's happening on the ISS, but you're living in relatively close quarters with other astronauts. What types of relationships did you build?

22:35There's a filmmaker wanted to make a show called Stuck in a Tin Can. And it hasn't been made yet. But, you know, I was kind of worried that I'd get cabin fever, being stuck in a tin can. But the space station is big. It's like the size of a 747 or I think bigger than that. And it's made in modules. And each of the modules is kind of like a school bus size module. And so even though you're there together with the same people for six months, in my case, it was a 200-day mission, all day long you go off, you work on your own things. You're kind of not around each other. And then at night, you come to get, like, dinner was always a fun time for me.

23:12I would go down to the Russian segment and have dinner. So it wasn't the claustrophobia that I thought it was at all. It was, I never felt, you know, cabin fever or anything like that. So that was another surprise. How do you think you'll feel once the ISS is deorbited? Sad. I'm going to feel very sad. There's a part of me, and I've written an op-ed that I was advocating to reboost the ISS to a higher kind of graveyard orbit so it would just be there forever. I don't actually think that's a good idea because if it explodes or if it's hit by another satellite, it would create this huge cloud of debris.

23:52So it's probably not a – emotionally, that's what I want to do.

24:00Intellectually, I know it's probably not the smartest thing to do. It's going to be sad. I mean, we've spent all this time and effort. I risked my life to help build the thing. So beyond the emotion of the space station being deorbited, how do you think we should remember the station? How do you suggest we think about its legacy? I think it'll be one of a kind. I don't think we're going to build anything like that anytime soon in the future. So I think we should look at it as a time when nations' former enemies came together to do something for the benefit of humanity, to do something inspirational.

24:42And I think we should also remember it as a stepping stone to go deeper into the solar system. I mean, I'm an explorer by heart. What I'm focused on in terms of space policy, I think we need to be laser focused on getting back to the moon. And even the moon, I think, is a stepping stone to Mars and deeper in the solar system. But I think the space station will be remembered for two things, the international cooperation and the stepping stone aspect in terms of deeper human exploration into the solar system. Well, to your point, Terry, NASA's made no secret that it doesn't intend to replace the ISS with the modern space station of its own.

25:19Instead, the agency wants to work with companies from the private sector. They plan to create commercially owned and administrative replacements. What do you think this change in strategy means for the U.S.'s spacefaring future? Well, I think if it were going to happen, I think that's the right step. Unfortunately, this administration has been very violently trying to cut NASA in terms of overall funding, and especially science. They want to cut almost half of their science budget. So it's one thing to say words, it's another thing to do deeds. And we need to get back to being serious about science in general for medical research and other things, but especially NASA.

25:58And they've also cut the future commercial space station project budget, and they've delayed it. And these companies can't go on forever. There's several, you know, five or six companies that are spending a lot of money. They're raising private equity through VC funds, and you can't just do that forever. And so, unfortunately, this administration has decided to slow down that progress, and we have to not do that because companies can't go on forever. Terry, it was great to talk to you. Thanks. Thanks for having me on. That was Terry Burtz, a former NASA astronaut and commander at the International Space Station.