NASA already has contracted SpaceX to build a lunar lander based on its massive Starship rocket. Elon Musk dreams of using a fleet of Starships to take settlers and the supplies they will need to survive on Mars. Some scientists have even considered what planetary missions the Starship might enable. And, an early concept imagining a Starship taking a crew to an Earth-approaching asteroid was discussed during an April Planetary Defense Conference in Vienna, Austria.
Recently, a NASA document surfaced revealing an unfunded Space Act Agreement between the agency and SpaceX for “preliminary design reviews” examining the potential development of a commercial space station derived from the Starship. The document describes a variety of steps that must be undertaken for the reviews to be completed sometime after 2028.
The agreement is not the first commercial space station project SpaceX has explored. It already has a contract with a company called Vast to launch a mini-space station in 2025, followed by a larger, multi-module facility in the 2030s.
NASA has been working with a number of private companies to explore concepts for commercial space stations as the operational life of the International Space Station ends. The space agency has funded Space Act Agreements with Blue Origin, Northrup Grumman and Voyager Space to develop designs for commercial space stations. NASA has a separate agreement with Axiom to attach modules to the International Space Station in advance of the launch of the company’s own space station.
The schedule of milestones that could lead to a Starship-derived space station is ambitious. The next launch of the Starship — provided that the Federal Aviation Administration approves it — would take place in September 2023. A Starship flight with a payload would happen in the first quarter of 2024. A Starship flight in which the vehicle lands intact back at the Starbase in Boca Chica, Texas, would take place in the third quarter of 2024. The design reviews of technologies relevant to a Starship-derived space station would follow.
The idea of launching a space station in one piece into low Earth orbit is nothing new. NASA deployed Skylab on a Saturn V rocket. When President Bill Clinton ordered the redesign of what was then called Space Station Freedom, NASA considered one version, called Option C, that would have launched on a heavy lift rocket connected to a space shuttle.
The sheer volume inside a Starship-derived space station would be its main advantage. Like Skylab, it can be mission-ready as soon as a crew is sent to it. SpaceX’s Crew Dragon, the only American spaceship able to send humans into space, can do just that.
The Starship’s rocket engines and fuel tanks constitute the main disadvantage of using it as a space station. They would become excess mass once the space station is deployed. No doubt SpaceX’s engineers will contrive some kind of workaround. For one thing, a space station with its own propulsion system, once it’s refueled, can be moved anywhere it is needed, perhaps to a higher Earth orbit or even in orbit around the moon.
Ideally, several of the companies exploring commercial space stations would succeed. The idea is not to replace the International Space Station with a single commercial option, but rather, to have several that will constitute a new industrial space infrastructure. Low Earth orbit will no longer be confined to a few government astronauts and those civilians with the vast financial backing to go. Travel to a commercial space station will become, in the main, a profitable enterprise.
The money spent building and maintaining the ISS has been well worth the investment. 3D printing experiments conducted on the space station have the potential to revolutionize everything from aerospace engineering to medicine, some of which will be commercialized in future commercial facilities.
Of the various efforts to conceive and/or build a commercial space station by the end of this decade, a SpaceX commercial space station has the most likelihood of succeeding. The track record amassed by Elon Musk’s company, if nothing else, suggests that will be the case.
Even though some have found SpaceX’s string of successes to be a problem, for most others it will be something to celebrate and, for the company’s competitors, something to aspire to.
Mark Whittington, who writes frequently about space policy, has published a political study of space exploration entitled “Why is It So Hard to Go Back to the Moon?“ as well as “The Moon, Mars and Beyond,” and, most recently, “Why is America Going Back to the Moon?“ He blogs at Curmudgeons Corner. He is published in the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, The Hill, USA Today, the LA Times and the Washington Post, among other venues.