Saving The ISS By Transforming It Into A Fantastical Floating Museum

The International Space Station – a blazing symbol of humanity’s destiny to move out across the cosmos – must be saved from NASA’s plan to crash the orbital outpost into the Antarctic seas, says a director of the National Space Society.

The ISS represents not only the peak of a global technological society, but also a triumph of “space diplomacy” – fusing breakthroughs by spaceflight powers across the continents – and should be protected for citizens of the centuries ahead, says Madhu Thangavelu, a co-leader of the Space Society, whose core mission is to create a spacefaring civilization.

An orbital treasure house of Free World ideals and the cross-cultural quest to create a utopian future, the Station should be given sanctuary in a higher orbit, Professor Thangavelu, who also heads a futuristic space architecture studio at the University of Southern California, told me in an interview.

Thangavelu is just one of the world-leading space scholars planet-wide who have been shell-shocked by NASA’s bombshell plan, unveiled in June, to despatch the $100-billion Station on a final kamikaze flight – to explode on impact with the remote Southern Ocean around the year 2030.

He says he backs replacing NASA’s “crash and burn” scheme with a counter-strategy outlined by the onetime heads of the European Space Agency and of NASA to protect the ISS into the far future.

Jean-Jacques Dordain, ESA’s Director General when the ISS was being assembled 400 kilometers above the Earth, and his American counterpart, former NASA Administrator Michael Griffin, have issued a joint appeal to all five partners on the Station that it be preserved as an outstanding beacon of human inventiveness.

Rather than being plunged into the seas, Dordain told me in an interview, the Space Station should be propelled upward, as a gift to astrophysicists, astronauts and space aficionados not yet born.

While NASA has commissioned SpaceX to design an assassin spacecraft that would guide the ISS to its deep-sea death, the dual space agency leaders say the very same SpaceX booster could instead be used to rescue the Station and give it a new life at a higher altitude.

Transforming this SpaceX-ISS flight into a resurrection mission “is the right thing to do, if the U.S. hopes to remain the leader and maintain our preeminence in human spaceflight and chart new territory like preservation of species heritage in space,” says Thangavelu, a onetime fellow at NASA’s Institute of Advanced Concepts who is also a scholar at the French-based International Space University.

“I think ISS is a unique facility in many respects. Science and engineering aside, it has paved the way for peaceful global cooperation, even among terrestrial adversaries, to this day.”

“It is a symbol of freedom,” he adds. “And there has never been such a facility or such intense collaboration among nations.”

NASA should reshape the Space Station’s destiny by teaming up with its partners – the European, Russian, Japanese and Canadian space agencies – to rewrite their Intergovernmental Agreement on the ISS.

“The ISS still has historic and symbolic significance associated with statecraft and diplomacy,” he says, and that symbolism will shine through its second life in another orbital plane.

Professor Thangavelu is part of an expanding constellation of vanguard space scholars and NewSpace leaders who are joining the movement to protect the ISS for future generations.

One of the world’s leading storytellers on the International Space Station’s near-mythical birth and life in the heavens has appealed for the ISS to be preserved for countless explorers waiting in the wings of time. The Station should be elevated into an orbital haven in recognition of its role as a heroic icon of the Space Age, says Roger Launius, NASA’s onetime Chief Historian, so that its epic space adventure can be extended across a new era.

Rick Tumlinson, a torchbearer in the “Save Our Station,” or SOS movement, has orchestrated parallel appeals by contacting Members of Congress to safeguard the ISS and by seeking out onetime ISS astronauts to join the rescue operation. Tumlinson, whose venture capital firm SpaceFund has invested in some of the independent space stations slated to replace the ISS in low Earth orbit, has also sought allies across the NewSpace sector to help shield the outpost.

Meanwhile, Professor Thangavelu, conceptual designer of space stations, Moon habitats and other extraterrestrial outposts, says the International Space Station would make the perfect centerpiece in his envisioned International Space Artifacts Museum, a fantastical floating citadel to spaceflight advances that would orbit around the Earth-Moon L1 Lagrange point.

In his sensational masterplan for this first celestial museum complex, Thangavelu also aims to one day rescue the Hubble Space Telescope, which is now in danger of falling back to Earth, and give it refuge, along with other pinnacles of aerospace engineering and design that chart the rise of the globe’s first techno-civilization.

While the SpaceX booster commissioned by NASA could initially transport the ISS to a “parking orbit,” he says, still-to-be-perfected electric thrusters, powered by the ISS solar arrays, could ultimately speed the Station to its far-off Lagrange L1 destination.

“China is already using advanced electric propulsion to maintain the Tiangong orbiting station,” he says. “We should be using similar technology to keep ISS flying.”

“Electric propulsion is far more efficient and produces much gentler thrust continuously, just what we need for ISS, once we push it a bit higher with regular chemical thrusters.”

“I think ISS has many more years of useful life,” he adds. If NASA still opts to decommission the ISS in 2030, it might consider handing over operational control of the Station to SpaceX, which could reopen the outpost as “a space tourist attraction for a few years before converting ISS into a museum.”

In its initial “ISS Transition Report” – outlining the scheme to destroy the Station – NASA’s leadership projected the agency would save $1.3 billion in operating costs for the orbiting laboratory by 2031, which could in turn be funneled into expanding Moon missions.

Yet Thangavelu says he has formulated an alternative, overarching spaceflight strategy for NASA that would allow the agency to save many times that amount: the National Aeronautics and Space Administration should renounce its plans to build the Moon-orbiting Gateway space station, an extraneous project that will do little to advance astronaut landings amid the orb’s ancient craters.

The envisaged, four-module Gateway, he says, adds needless complexity and expense to the NASA-led quest for North American, Japanese and European discoverers to touch down near the Moon’s South Pole, and can be abolished without jeopardizing these targeted Moonwalking missions across the 2020s, he says.

Jettisoning the Gateway blueprints, he adds, would help NASA and its partners laser focus on exploring the lava tubes and “peaks of eternal light” around the polar sector while mapping candidate sites for the first human settlement on the Moon.

“Lunar lava tubes would be ideal locations to build permanent habitats, naturally protected from the harsh space and lunar surface environments,” says Thangavelu, who has written extensively on robotically constructing these first-wave sanctuaries for a new branch of civilization on the Moon.

During the first human landings on the Moon in the new millennium, Artemis aeronauts will touch down inside the colossal next-generation Starships that NASA has commissioned SpaceX to fly. SpaceX’s supersize Starship capsule, with its 1100 cubic meters of pressurized living space – rivaling the capacity of the ISS – could double as an incredible observatory in orbit around the silver-black Moon.

Cosmic architect Thangavelu, meanwhile, says his ever-expanding vision for the regenerated International Space Station, and its ethereal new home at the heart of the International Space Artifacts Museum, is elaborately depicted in the upcoming third edition of his fascinating space tome The Moon: Resources, Future Development and Settlement, set to be released in mid-2025.

As the ISS flies across its new Elysian orbit around the first Earth-Moon Lagrange point through the next centuries, it will shine as a sensational lighthouse for humanity’s progress in becoming perhaps the Milky Way’s newest spacefaring civilization.