Washington (AFP)
After more than 20 years of continuous human presence on board, the International Space Station is operating at full capacity, with a few good years ahead thanks to the return of flights from the United States.
But the question of its future is becoming more and more important.
The ISS "has become the spaceport we want it to be," Kathy Lueders, head of manned programs at NASA, told a press conference earlier this month.
After the end of space shuttles in 2011, Russian Soyuz rockets remained the only "taxis" to get there.
But since last year, thanks to the company SpaceX, flights from the United States have resumed.
"Our recent agreement with private industry allows us to bring more people to the International Space Station," said Joel Montalbano, program director of the station for NASA.
As SpaceX's capsule, Dragon, can take four astronauts (compared to three for Soyuz), the standard crew size has been reduced from six to seven.
In the ISS, we must therefore add ... a bed.
Installing.
The second regular mission to fly with Dragon, Crew-2, will take off on April 22 from Florida, with Frenchman Thomas Pesquet on board.
They will cohabit for a few days with the four astronauts of Crew-1, who will then return after six months in space.
During this handover period, the Space Station will accommodate no less than 11 people.
“We'll be in camping mode a bit,” said Shane Kimbrough of Crew-2.
"You'll have to find a place to sleep against a wall or on the ceiling."
- More science -
"We are entering the golden age of using the ISS," said David Parker, director of human and robotic exploration at the European Space Agency (ESA), partner.
The crazy project dates back to 1984, however, when Ronald Reagan asked NASA to develop "a permanently manned space station".
The first segments were sent into space in 1998. The first crew spent several months there in 2000. And the assembly of this immense puzzle 108 meters long was completed in 2011.
"During the first half of the life of the space station, most of the attention was focused on its construction," Robert Pearlman, space historian and co-author of a book on the topic.
Today, astronauts still have to perform maintenance operations, but "the majority of their time is spent performing hundreds of scientific experiments."
More than 3,000 experiments carried out in this weightless laboratory, which spins in orbit 400 km above the Earth, at 28,000 km / h.
"There are so many things up there," says Thomas Pesquet with an amused air.
"If you could just press a button to instantly bring them to you and do your job, that would be brilliant."
- What future?
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The future of the ISS is now officially assured until 2024 by the governments of the United States, Russia, Europe, Japan and Canada.
And "from a technical point of view, we have validated that the ISS will be able to fly until 2028", Nasa told AFP.
"Additionally, our analysis did not identify any issues that would prevent an expansion beyond 2028."
The study for the period 2028-2032 should be launched "later this year", according to Joel Montalbano.
But the use of the Station will evolve.
NASA, which is seeking to disengage financially to focus on distant exploration (the Moon and Mars), announced in 2019 that it would welcome tourists to the ISS, for remuneration.
They will go there with SpaceX, or Boeing - whose development of its own "taxi", the Starliner capsule, is behind schedule.
"My hope is that we will fly the first private astronaut mission in 2022," Joel Montalbano told AFP.
If the ISS will therefore fly for a few more years, the replacements are already jostling at the gate.
The company Axiom Space wants to build "the first commercial international space station", initially attached to the ISS.
China also plans to begin assembly of a large space station, Tiangong, this year and complete it by 2022.
And Russia has just announced a project for a lunar station, "on its surface or in orbit", in collaboration with Beijing, after having shunned the American project for a lunar Gateway mini-station, which will serve as a stage for future Americans going to the moon.
Quite a symbol: the decades of Russian-American partnership in space could well come to an end when the ISS will finally, at the time of its retreat, be sent to Earth to come crashing into the ocean.
© 2021 AFP