FUTURE OF SPACE STATION HANGS IN UNCERTAINITY

         With the new Russian space agency chief announcing to pull out of the International Space Station (ISS) project by 2024 on the ground of the Western sanctions against Russia due to its invasion of Ukraine, this has come as a disappointment for the scientific communities of the world as the space station is a platform for furthering the scientific pursuits of humanity, and not an arena for politicizing an event. Russia’s space agency already ran into controversy when it recently show-cased images of its cosmonauts onboard the ISS celebrating Moscow’s capture of the eastern Ukrainian region of Luhansk.

        Since the end of the Cold War, the ISS has been a major avenue of cooperation between the West and Russia.  The ISS was an international collaborative effort of 5 countries of the world namely USA (NASA), Russia (Roscosmos), Europe (European Space Agency), Japan (Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency), and Canada  (Canadian Space Agency). The station served as a space-based lab in which scientific research in various fields such as astrobiology, astronomy, meteorology and physics could be carried out in zero-gravity conditions which normally is not possible on Earth. The data will be used to test human endurance in space for long-duration stays that would ultimately pave the way for building permanent human colonies in space.   As of 2010, the total cost of the project was 150 billion dollars.

       The ISS is the ninth space station to be inhabited by crews following the Russian Mir and the American Skylab space stations. It is the largest man-made object put into space and the largest satellite in low Earth orbit to be regularly visible to the naked eye. It maintains an orbit with an average altitude of 400 km circling the Earth in about 93 minutes.

        One of the most complex engineering projects ever attempted, the ISS is made up of two primary segments: one managed by NASA of the USA and the other by Roscosmos of Russia. While the Russian segment incorporates six modules, the US segment includes ten modules. The ISS consists of pressurized habitation modules for humans , structural trusses, photovoltaic solar arrays, thermal radiators , docking ports, experiment bays and robotic arms for scientific explorations. Major ISS modules have been launched by Russian Proton and Soyuz rockets and various US space shuttles. The station is regularly serviced by a variety of visiting spacecrafts from stakeholder nations mainly the Russian Soyuz and Progress and the US Space X. As of April 2022, 251 astronauts, cosmonauts and space tourists from twenty different nations have visited the space station, many of them in multiple times.

       The ISS was launched from Baikonur cosmodrome of Russia in 1998, and the first long-term human residents arrived on 2 November 2000. The station has since been continuously occupied for more than 21 years, the longest continuous human presence in low Earth orbit, having surpassed the previous record of 9 years and 357 days held by the Mir space station. Although ISS was initially agreed upon by parties to function upto 2024, it was later decided to extend its operation till 2030 through additional funding.

             If Russia does leave the project, this would, no doubt, seriously jeopardize the activity of the space station as the Russian side provides the crucial propulsion mechanism that keeps the platform afloat in orbit. Regular cargo and crew missions by Russia's Soyuz and Progress rockets supply the necessary fuel to the propulsion engines of the spacecraft that boost its height periodically to compensate for the height loss due to atmospheric air drag. Without these periodical boostings, the space station would dangerously spiral into the earth's atmosphere eventually burning out in the air. As the US side simply looks after the power and communication system of the space station, it seems unlikely the US and its partner nations would quickly find a solution to the vital propulsion system to keep the aging spacecraft get going in the event of a Russian withdrawal.  

                                                                                                                        Nikunja Bihari Sahu

 Education Officer

Regional Science Centre

Bhopal

 

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