Michael López-Alegría: Selling access to the International Space Station will help it survive

(López-Alegría is a four-time astronaut and recent inductee to the U.S. Astronaut Hall of fame. He holds NASA records for the most extravehicular activities (EVA) or “space walks” (10) and cumulative EVA time (67 hours 40 minutes). He is also the director of business development at Axiom Space, and will serve as mission commander for Axiom Space’s Ax-1 orbital flight set for Feb. 28.) Growing up, I had dreams of being an astronaut. My best friend and I played “rocket ship” in the closet of my bedroom, whose interior had been mocked up to look like some kind of space vehicle. My mom — who worked for a NASA education office — brought home brochures about the space program called NASA Facts. The day we listened to the decent of Eagle to the lunar surface was transformational. And with the lessons learned from both of my parents, I achieved those dreams as a four-time astronaut. I look forward to returning to the International Space Station this year, not as a NASA employee, but as the commander of the first Axiom Space mission. As we look to the next chapter in human spaceflight, where private citizens increasingly join government astronauts as spacefarers, we must avoid a gap in access to low Earth orbit. The International Space State, which some people view as an outdated relic, still has a role to play. Axiom, where I serve as a vice president, is developing a commercial space station that will start attached to the ISS.

Having spent seven months on the ISS as the commander of Expedition 14, I can attest that the station a singular achievement in human history — an incredibly complex engineering project made even more challenging by its international proprietorship of five agencies and 15 countries. Starting in 1998, it was assembled, piece by piece while moving over 17,000 miles per hour hundreds of miles above Earth. Many of these pieces had never been in the same country, let alone the same room. They were designed and built around the globe by people speaking different languages, using different alphabets and even different measurement systems. Today it is a fully operational microgravity and space environment laboratory. It has been continuously inhabited for 21 years and well over 3,000 experiments have been performed on board, many of which have had profound impacts on life on Earth. But, as magnificent as it is, it’s a machine, and one day it will wear out. None of those five agencies or 15 countries have made any serious indication of their intention to build a follow-on government platform. The partnership with Russia, in particular, is strained. Yet many have indicated their strong desire to continue to send their astronauts to low Earth orbit to continue the important human research, physical science investigations and technology development and demonstration that can only be accomplished in a sustained microgravity environment. Technology for travel to more distant parts of space is also tested in low Earth orbit. So, what’s the solution? A commercial space station. Preferably more than one, where government space agencies are but one of many consumers of microgravity services.