According to the IG, the path to de-orbit would cost $950 million and take three years.īut with a change in administration in 2009 came a change in direction. To accomplish this, the agency would have to work with the other countries to come to an agreement. Suffredini reiterated that the agency was ready to prep and de-orbit the spacecraft. In 2009 before Congress, NASA’s space station manager Michael T. Still, the move toward commercial partners could come with a 59 percent increase in cost by 2024.įor most of the life of the project, NASA planned to decommission and deorbit the ISS when it reached the end of its life in 2015. NASA recently released a list of 10 private companies that it will be working with to develop commercial crew transport. By 2018, however, that cost had increased to $81 million per seat, an increase of 372% over 10 years. Before the Space Shuttle program was shut down in 2008, NASA bought tickets for $21.8 million per seat. The cost of transporting crew has increased sharply over the years. Since NASA decommissioned the Space Shuttle back in July of 2011, NASA has been working with the Russian government for crew transport and private companies for cargo transit. Further, a significant proportion of spending on the ISS comes from transportation, about 34 percent. In total, the ISS maintenance comprises a fifth of NASA’s $19.1 billion budget. According to NASA’s Inspector General (IG), over $87 billion has been put into the station so far, and NASA is projected to spend between $3 to $4 billion per year to maintain it. Perhaps not surprisingly, the ISS has become one of NASA’s most expensive projects. As the Washington Post noted some years ago, the ISS was built primarily to give the space shuttle somewhere to go. Yet these goals did not translate into a financially stable mission. When the ISS was first conceived, it was intended to be a laboratory in space, a permanent observatory, and a staging base for future missions. The International Space Station’s Ballooning Costs
A better long-term option might be decommission-a nice word for burning up the station as it reenters the atmosphere over the Pacific Ocean. Best estimates indicate the total annualized revenues would be short of the projected costs by $1 billion to $1.8 billion.
In addition, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) should consider reforming the management approach of the station.Įven with these reforms, however, the prospects for a successful privatization look dim. Allowing private entities to own the patents for innovations developed on the ISS could encourage significantly more investment than the ISS currently receives. Successfully gaining private investment in the ISS would require reforming the National Lab on the ISS, and specifically the property rights regime. President Trump’s 2019 budget takes the first approach, aiming for a budgetary blackout by 2024. Funding for the ISS was set to end just after the station reached the end of its life in 2015, but during the Obama Administration, Congress extended the life of the ISS until 2024.Īt the moment, two major options exist for the ISS: privatization or decommission. Though it was only supposed to be in orbit for 15 years, the ISS is now going on 20. The future of the International Space Station (ISS) is in limbo.
INTERNATIONAL SPACE STATION DECOMMISSION FULL
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