NASA recently confirmed their plans for the International Space Station (ISS) – they will keep the station operational through 2030 and then sometime in 2031 ditch it into the sea. They will be aiming for point Nemo, which is the location in the Pacific ocean that is furthest from any land, 2688 km. It is unfortunate that it is not feasible to push the station instead into a safe orbit, out of the way where it can remain as a museum of sorts. But it is best to keep low Earth orbit clear of debris as much as possible, so ditching it is the safest thing to do.

Meanwhile, the ISS has about nine years of life left and there is a lot of science planned for that time. They are currently giving the station a power upgrade, installing new batteries and equipment to allow for the addition of a new solar array to give the station more power.

One of the primary missions of the ISS is to be a laboratory for experiments on the long term effects of living in microgravity and ways to mitigate them. Right now NASA (or any other space agency) has no plans to develop true artificial gravity for their deep space missions. Essentially there are two methods for creating artificial gravity. One is constant acceleration, but we do not have the technology to develop a drive that can create significant G-forces for any significant length of time. We essentially have craft (like ion drive or perhaps solar sails) that can produce very slight acceleration for a long time. Or we have chemical rockets that can produce high acceleration for a short time. Even nuclear powered ships would spend most of their time on long trips (to Mars, for example) coasting. So this is simply not practical.

The other form of artificial gravity is rotation. There are practical limiting factors here as well. First, any rotating structure would have to be very large, on the order of a kilometer or more along its axis of rotation, in order to minimize vertigo and disorientation. This is not practical for any current spaceship design. We may have a space station that uses rotation for artificial gravity sometime this century, but likely not a space ship. Even clever designs, like having two capsules that are attached by a strong cable that, once the ship is coasting, can extend out from each other, forming a long axis that can rotate, will have significant engineering challenges. NASA’s current attitude is – not anytime in the foreseeable future.

Until then the solution to microgravity is simply to deal with the physiological effects, and that is where the ISS research comes in. One of the big problems with spending a long time in microgravity is that fluid redistributes throughout the body, with more fluid than usual in the upper body. This can have negative effects on cardiopulmonary function and the eyes, for example. NASA is therefore working on an “artificial gravity suit”, which may be a bit of a misleading name. The idea of the suit is to create a negative pressure in the lower half of the body, to suck fluid down and duplicate the effects of gravity on fluid distribution. The suit is being evaluated in the Russian segment, by Commander Anton Shkaplerov and Flight Engineer Pyotr Dubrov.

Speaking of the Russian segment, in perhaps the weirdest outcome of the horrific Ukraine invasion, the head of Roscosmos, Dmitry Rogozin, said the equivalent of,  “Nice space station you have here. It would be terrible if something happened to it, like crashing into the ground.” What he literally said was that Roscosmos “will closely monitor the actions of our American partners and, if they continue to be hostile, we will return to the question of the existence of the International Space Station.” And, more menacingly, “If you block cooperation with us, who will save the International Space Station (ISS) from an uncontrolled deorbit and fall into the United States or…Europe?” Rogozin said in one of his tweets. “There is also the possibility of a 500-ton structure falling on India and China. Do you want to threaten them with such a prospect? The ISS does not fly over Russia, therefore all the risks are yours. Are you ready for them?”

Currently Russian engines are used to adjust the orbit of the ISS, so essentially the Russians are threatening to withdraw the use of their rockets so that the station cannot move out of the way of debris or maintain its orbit. Recently they doubled-down on this threat by releasing a video depicting the Russian segment of the ISS detaching and going it’s own way.

NASA downplayed all of this bluster, saying in a statement, “Despite the challenges here on Earth, and they are substantial …. NASA continues the working relationship with all our international partners to ensure their safety and the ongoing safe operations of the ISS.”

This is all, of course, extremely unfortunate. Space exploration has always had the potential to go one of two ways, competition or collaboration. The race to land on the Moon was all about competition, and that was critical to early funding. But since Apollo we have been moving more in the direction of collaboration in space, and the ISS is the greatest manifestation of that. Despite politics down here on Earth, even competitive nations can cooperate in space. It can be an effective mechanism for diplomacy. So it is sad to see the ISS instantly become a tool, in the most extreme way, of political propaganda and saber rattling. In fact, we seem to be heading back toward a new space race, between the USA and its allies, Russia, and China. A little healthy competition can be a good thing, but I suspect “healthy” won’t be the operative word here. We’ll see.