SPACE & COSMOS

NASA Extends the Life of the International Space Station

By KENNETH CHANG JAN. 8, 2014

Launch media viewer
The International Space Station will stay in orbit for at least four years after 2020, NASA said. Uncredited/NASA, via Associated Press

Instead of splashing into the Pacific Ocean in 2020 as planned, the International Space Station will continue circling Earth for at least an additional four years,NASA announced on Wednesday.

William H. Gerstenmaier, NASA’s associate administrator for human exploration and operations, said the extra time would lead more scientists to propose experiments, spur a young commercial space industry and allow the space agency to solve health and technical challenges before sending its astronauts on more distant missions.

If the station were destined for destruction just six years from now, scientists and companies would be more reluctant to invest their time and money, Mr. Gerstenmaier said. “Potentially, that creates a new economy in space,” he said.

Two companies, SpaceX and the Orbital Sciences Corporation, fly cargo to the space station, and NASA is looking to hire commercial “space taxis” to take astronauts beginning in 2017. Mr. Gerstenmaier said he thought that more companies would now also look at how they could take advantage of the weightlessness of space for profit.

Last year, NASA studied the station and concluded that it could last until 2028. The other space agencies participating in it, including the European Space Agency and those of Russia and Japan, have not decided whether they, too, will continue beyond 2020.

“In general, they’re all pretty supportive,” Mr. Gerstenmaier said, adding that if necessary, NASA would go it alone.

This is the second time the Obama administration has extended the life of the orbiting laboratory.

When President Obama entered the White House, NASA was working to send astronauts back to the moon, and the space station, which was still being built, was to be nudged to a fiery ocean crash in 2016. The cost of operating the station, about $3 billion a year, could then be devoted to the moon program.

However, it always seemed unlikely that the station, which was built at a cost of $100 billion and completed just three years ago, would be discarded that soon, and when the Obama administration announced it wanted to cancel the moon program, it gave the first extension, stretching the life of the station to 2020.

Mr. Gerstenmaier said that unexpected challenges would still pop up at the station.

“This is going to be life on the frontier,” he said. Last month, a valve in a cooling pump failed, curtailing work on the station until astronauts installed a spare pump, an incident that illustrated the need for more reliable systems for deep space missions.

“If I’m going to go beyond low-Earth orbit, I have a lot of work that I still need to do,” Mr. Gerstenmaier said. “I need to understand how the human performs in spaceflight. How can I make sure I have a pump system for a three-year or two-year trip to Mars and back?”

A cargo rocket that was to be launched to the space station on Wednesday by Orbital Sciences was delayed until at least Thursday, because of an explosion on the sun and the torrent of charged particles that could have interfered with the spacecraft’s electronics.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/09/sc...tion.html?_r=0