The sprawling International Space Station—so long a beacon of hope, unity, and technological achievement; so gleaming and bright it can be seen from a city's downtown as it passes overhead—is nearer the end of its life than the beginning. And time is running out to replace the station before it's gone.
Its first component, the Russian-built Zarya power and propulsion module, was launched in 1998. The other core pieces of the station were all sent spaceward by 2001. The backbone of the International Space Station, therefore, has spent two decades in space—a harsh environment of wild temperature swings, micrometeoroid impacts, torsional strains, and more.
In recent years, signs of aging have become more apparent, particularly with cracks spreading across the Zvezda module. And more than the hardware is coming apart. The political forces that drove the formation of the space station partnership, principally the desire of the United States and Russia to work together after the Soviet breakup, have given way to a zealous anti-Americanism in Moscow and suspicions in Washington, DC. The partnership remains intact for now, thanks to healthy working relationships among astronauts, cosmonauts, and engineers. But politically, the rhetoric is at times toxic.
Although nothing has been formalized, a general consensus has emerged among the international partners that the International Space Station can probably keep flying through 2028 or 2030. But after that? NASA realizes it needs a succession plan.
Politicians and policymakers have started employing the spectre of the dreaded "g" word, saying NASA must avoid a "gap" in flying a low-Earth-orbit space station. This has become especially urgent with China's recent, successful launch of its own Tiangong space station in April. In response to these concerns, NASA has hatched a plan. Recognizing the maturing US commercial space industry, NASA intends to become an "anchor tenant" of one or more privately developed space stations.
"We're seeing a slow buildup to something significant," said Jeff Manber, chief executive of Nanoracks. "We're entering an era when there will be private space stations. It's clear the political stars have aligned. Congress has realized that the ISS is coming to an end at some point, and we have to prepare so there is no space station gap."
Now, we're finally getting a glimpse of what such a future might look like and how fierce the competition may be. A Houston-based company called Axiom Space has been most public about its intentions, talking for a few years now about developing the world's "first commercial space station." But this week, two other options emerged for NASA: Nanoracks and Lockheed Martin announced their intent to build a space station called "Starlab," and another team led by Blue Origin and Sierra Space revealed plans to construct an "Orbital Reef."
There will likely be more bidders soon offering private station concepts as well. For the first time, Congress looks like it will appropriate significant funding for what NASA calls "Commercial LEO Destinations." And the government money may eventually get much, much bigger.
Presently, NASA spends about $4 billion annually for its low-Earth-orbit program. This includes maintenance of the space station itself, cargo and crew transportation, space communications, and more. No one expects NASA to spend this much on commercial space stations, but it will need to spend a sizable fraction of its current ISS budget if any of these commercial stations are to be fully realized.
With this week's announcements, the food fight for that funding is now well and truly underway.
Axiom Space
Axiom was founded in 2016 with the express purpose of building a commercial space station as a follow-on to the International Space Station.
Michael Suffredini, NASA's longtime manager of the ISS program, brought decades of expertise to the company. The other co-founder is space entrepreneur Kam Ghaffarian, who provided the startup funding to get the venture off the ground five years ago.
"There were all these companies building rockets to go to space," Ghaffarian told Ars in an interview. "So we didn't want to be in the ride business. We wanted to be in a destination business. We wanted to create a new ecosystem in low Earth orbit."
Axiom has identified a number of potential markets for a commercial space station. Ghaffarian said the company envisions using its station for private and government astronauts, manufacturing and 3D printing, satellite servicing, and perhaps even a space-based data center.
"I feel like we're in the early days of the Internet, in terms of the potential of all the things that we can accomplish," he said.
As a first step toward its goal of increasing access to low Earth orbit, Axiom is taking private citizens to the International Space Station for short visits. Working with NASA and SpaceX, these once- or even twice-yearly missions will begin with the Ax-1 flight now scheduled for launch in February 2022.
In one respect, Axiom has a head start over its rivals in working toward commercial space stations. In February 2020, following a competitive procurement process, the company won a $140 million contract from NASA to develop a habitable commercial module for the International Space Station. The award gives Axiom the right to attach its module to the station's Node 2 forward point.
With this award, the company plans to launch its first privately built module to the space station in 2024. This will both validate its modular technology—Axiom has partnered with Thales Alenia Space to construct its habitats—and provide quarters for its visiting private astronauts. Future modules will follow in the 2020s, as early as 2028, before the Axiom space station will separate and become its own free-flying entity.
The other space station companies will have to develop "free flying" space stations, complete with all the power and other consumables they need to function, from the outset. Axiom, by contrast, will benefit from having some basic services (like power) from the International Space Station at the beginning.
Nanoracks-Lockheed Martin
Another Houston-based company, Nanoracks, announced its entry into the space station competition last week. The company says it will partner with Lockheed Martin for fabrication of the station and with holding company Voyager Space to assist with raising hundreds of millions of dollars for the project. The goal is to launch the free-flying "Starlab" space station in 2027.
The Starlab facility will include a large inflatable habitat, designed and built by Lockheed Martin, a metallic docking node, a power and propulsion element, a large robotic arm, and a state-of-the-art laboratory for science, research, and manufacturing. The facility will have an initial capacity for four astronauts to live and work there continuously.
"We take seriously that this is a commercial venture," Manber, the Nanoracks CEO, said. "Our numbers are real based on a decade of working on ISS. This is something we can sell to the private sector. We can sell this to other space agencies. This is not a viewgraph presentation. We have finally reached a point in the industry, we have the transportation and the political support. This has been a decade in the making, so what excites me is that this is doable."
While it may be surprising that a relatively small company is taking the lead on this project—Nanoracks has about 100 employees compared to more than 100,000 for Lockheed Martin, the largest US contractor by far—the approach makes sense for Starlab, Manber said.
This is because, for any private station to be sustainable, it must ultimately survive on private commerce rather than existing solely to serve the US government, Manber said. Nanoracks was founded to provide commercial access to space for small research payloads, and the "racks" in its name refers to scientific racks. No company has been more successful at "commercializing" the International Space Station over the last decade, as Nanoracks has shepherded more than 1,300 payloads into space during that time.
Manber said Nanoracks will pair this expertise at developing commercial activity in low Earth orbit with the credibility and heritage of Lockheed Martin. The Colorado-based industry giant has decades of experience building spacecraft and satellites, and a spokesman said it has been making strategic investments in space habitats "for some time now," some of which has been applied toward inflatable technologies.
Voyager Space, a holding company founded in 2019 by investor Dylan Taylor, acquired a majority interest in Nanoracks in May. Looking ahead to the later 2020s, Taylor says three key space areas for economic development are commercial space stations, orbital servicing, and infrastructure near the Moon.
Taylor views a commercial space station as a "beachhead" for future space settlements, be it on other worlds or in large, space-based habitats such as O'Neill cylinders. He is excited to pair one of the few companies that understands servicing a space station, Nanoracks, with an aerospace company that can deliver hardware on time and on budget, Lockheed.
He also envisions NASA's "Commercial LEO Destinations" competition as more than a zero-sum game. "It's not a winner-take-all market," Taylor said. "There are a lot of players we want to see be successful. How do we get four or five really high-quality projects flying in different orbits? It will accelerate our ability to do so many more things."
Blue Origin-Sierra Space
The latest space station announcement came on Monday, at the International Astronautical Congress in Dubai. Two private companies, Blue Origin and Sierra Space, announced they would lead development and construction of a large modular space station named "Orbital Reef."
Officials from Blue Origin and Sierra Space said during a news conference the companies intended to launch a baseline configuration of the station, including large core, habitat, and science modules, by the second half of this decade. Orbital Reef would be large, comprising 90 percent of the habitable volume of the International Space Station while allowing for up to 10 people to stay on board at any given time.
Blue Origin, the rocket company founded by Jeff Bezos, would develop the large-diameter core module and launch the station with its reusable heavy-lift New Glenn rocket. Sierra Space would provide a large inflatable module and the Dream Chaser spacecraft for cargo and potentially crew operations.
Secondary partners include Boeing, which would provide a science module, maintain the station, and deliver astronauts with its Starliner crew vehicle. Redwire Space would superintend payload operations, research, and microgravity manufacturing. Genesis Engineering Solutions would develop a "single-person spacecraft" for tourist excursions. Arizona State University will engage the academic community.
"We're going to attract a lot of different users with a lot of different potential applications in space," said Janet Kavandi, head of Sierra Space. "We're going to give them one really unique and optimal place to go to, so that they can all work together, live together, enjoy space together, and be profitable up there in this environment."
This approach appears to be the most costly, as it is the largest and most ambitious station. (Also, if Orbital Reef is initially serviced by Boeing's Starliner, transportation would likely cost substantially more per astronaut than SpaceX's Crew Dragon). At the news conference, officials were asked how much the baseline configuration of Orbital Reef would cost compared to development of the International Space Station, which was in excess of $100 billion.
Blue Origin Senior Vice President of Advanced Development Programs Brent Sherwood replied that it would be "at least an order of magnitude less than" the existing space station.
Some assets are already close at hand, Sherwood said. He pointed to substantial investments already made by Blue Origin in the New Glenn launch vehicle, as well as technology development for the core module. Kavandi said Sierra Space's owners had invested more than $1 billion into Dream Chaser and still more into its inflatable habitats. Orbital Reef may also seek to salvage some hardware from the ISS.
What comes next
In the coming weeks, more potential space station competitors may emerge. More than four dozen firms signed up as "interested parties" for NASA's Commercial LEO Destinations procurement earlier this year (see .pdf). Some of the big names on that list, so far, have been quiet.
Northrop Grumman, for example, is already building a habitat module, called the Lunar Gateway, for NASA to orbit the Moon. With not too much difficulty, it could also repurpose this technology for a low-Earth-orbit space station. SpaceX, too, has been on a winning streak for major NASA contracts. It could potentially modify its massive Starship vehicle to serve as a space station.
As part of NASA's commercial stations program, the deadline to apply for Phase 1 funding closed on August 26. NASA has not yet announced its selections. As part of Phase 1, the agency is expected to select a handful of companies to advance their concepts for a commercial station and reach the stage of a "preliminary design review." Under Phase 2, NASA would purchase transportation of cargo and crew to and from commercial space stations and accommodations there.
So far, NASA has received only a small amount of funding for commercial space stations from Congress, but that could begin to change with the fiscal year 2022 budget. In its appropriations bill, the US Senate offered $101 million for the current fiscal year.
Former NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine, who pushed for such funding during his tenure leading the space agency from 2018 to early 2021, told senators at a committee hearing last week that this funding was "nice, but frankly not enough." Setting the program up for success will require significantly more funding. Although the International Space Station's lifetime should be extended to 2030, Bridenstine said that believing the aging outpost will last forever is a mistake. The time to prepare for the future is now.
NASA, Bridenstine said, also needs to be clear with policymakers about how much it deems necessary to spend on commercial space stations over the next five years. "NASA needs to say 'here's how we're going to replace it, here's how much it will cost,' and then put that amount in the president's Budget Request," he said.
Such financial information would also provide some clarity to would-be commercial space station developers who are operating in the dark about how much money NASA anticipates spending on private stations and how much money Congress is willing to appropriate. The challenge for the private developers is that, to launch viable stations during the second half of the 2020s—before the retirement of the International Space Station—significant investments need to be made now.
Brent Sherwood, of Blue Origin, said the Orbital Reef team is compensating for this by investing aggressively now. He anticipates small awards for Phase 1 of the NASA program and does not believe the agency will make Phase 2 awards until the mid-2020s.
"You can't start in the middle part of the decade and have a station ready to be operating before the ISS is retired if it's retired in 2030," he said. "So we are proceeding into full-scale development at this time, in order to meet the schedule of the second half of this decade for operational capability."
Each of the three announced bidders brings certain strengths to the competition, which adds intrigue to the competition. Axiom has a head start, and the company was literally created for this purpose. The Nanoracks-led Starlab project has a keen understanding of how to commercialize low Earth orbit and Lockheed's experience in building spacecraft. Blue Origin and Sierra Space have deep pockets and a broad team.
It's an exciting time for those interested to see how nonprofessional astronauts adapt to living and working in space and find ways to make money there. Taylor, who is raising funds for Starlab, equated this moment in human expansion to the point at which life first emerged from the oceans on Earth. Humans aren't certain what they're going to do in low Earth orbit or how they'll be able to survive in the harsh environment. But it's the next step. "When life left the ocean and flopped onto the beach," he said, "that’s kind of where we are as a civilization now."
Let the flopping commence.
