The Age of the Private Space Station Is Upon Us

It was all smiles and thumbs-up on March 30, at 5:28 PM local time, when NASA astronaut Mark Vande Hei and Russian cosmonauts Anton Shkaplerov and Pyotr Dubrov thumped down in the steppes of Kazakhstan aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft—and with good reason. For one thing, Vande Hei had just completed a marathon 355 consecutive days aboard the International Space Station (ISS), setting a new U.S. space endurance record. For another—more important—thing, the joint U.S.-Russian return to Earth was one of the rare exercises in cooperation between the two nations during the white-hot tension between Washington and Moscow over the war in Ukraine. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] From its inception more than a generation ago, the ISS—which was built and is maintained by 15 nations, led by the U.S. and Russia—was always intended to be an exercise in peaceable relations between two nations that fought a decades-long Cold War. “Up in space, we can have a cooperation with our Russian friends, our colleagues,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said in a press statement after Russia’s expanded invasion of Ukraine began and before the crew’s return. “The professional relationship between astronauts and cosmonauts, it hasn’t missed a beat. This is the cooperation we have going on in the civilian space program.” But what war can not break, time and age can. The $150 billion ISS—as big as a football field a...
Source: TIME: Science - Category: Science Authors: Tags: Uncategorized healthscienceclimate Space Source Type: news