Partnerships: International Collaboration in Low-Earth Orbit and Beyond

By Craig Collins - February 27, 2019

STS-131 and Expedition 23 crewmembers gathered for a group portrait in the Kibo laboratory of the International Space Station while Space Shuttle Discovery remained docked with the station. STS-131 crewmembers pictured (light blue shirts) are NASA astronauts Alan Poindexter, commander; James P. Dutton Jr., pilot; and Clayton Anderson, Rick Mastracchio, Dorothy Metcalf-Lindenburger, Stephanie Wilson, and Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency astronaut Naoko Yamazaki, all mission specialists. Expedition 23 crewmembers pictured are Russian cosmonauts Oleg Kotov, commander, and Mikhail Kornienko and Alexander Skvortsov; Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency astronaut Soichi Noguchi; and NASA astronauts T.J. Creamer and Tracy Caldwell Dyson, all flight engineers. NASA photo

The ISS program itself is directed by the Johnson Space Center (JSC) in Houston, Texas, where Mission Control operates the U.S. Orbital Segment and manages activities across the ISS in coordination with international partners. JSC is the primary location for spacecraft design, development, mission integration, crew training, and administration of the Commercial Crew and Cargo Program.

The ISS’s Payload Operations and Integration Center (POIC) at Marshall Space Flight Center is the headquarters for ISS science operations. POIC plans and controls the operations of U.S experiments, coordinates partner experiments aboard the station, and handles science communications with ISS crew.

Both Johnson and Marshall are home to Telescience Support Centers (TSCs) that provide around-the-clock operations support for science operations aboard the ISS. Additional TSCs are located at the Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, Mountain View, California, and Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, Ohio.

The Key to Future Long-Term Missions

Over the past decade, the ISS has been supported by a growing network of individuals and organizations who view the station as an opportunity for growth. At the same time, the ISS is helping to foster private-sector innovation in space. The post-Space Shuttle era has seen the first private-sector cargo deliveries to the ISS, aboard the Dragon spacecraft, manufactured by SpaceX and launched from Falcon 9 rockets at Cape Canaveral, and Cygnus, made by Orbital Sciences (now Northrop Grumman) and launched aboard Antares rockets from Wallops Island, Virginia, and Atlas V rockets from Kennedy Space Center. A second phase of cargo resupply contracts was awarded in 2016 to SpaceX, Northrop Grumman, and Sierra Nevada Corporation for cargo delivery through 2024.

In August 2018, NASA presented the first post-Space Shuttle crew to launch from U.S. soil. In 2019, the world’s first private company astronaut will join a test flight and mission aboard an American-made spacecraft, the Boeing CST-100 Starliner. The SpaceX Crew Dragon will also fly American astronauts, but the initial crew will be current NASA astronauts.

On its website, the Center for the Advancement of Science in Space (CASIS), the organization that coordinates U.S. research on the ISS National Laboratory, offers thanks to more than 40 “implementation partners” dedicated to promoting and sustaining space-based research. These partners include NanoRacks, a company that developed a standardized payload system and instrumentation that can be used by non-NASA researchers aboard the ISS.

The Bigelow Expandable Activity Module (BEAM) was installed on the International Space Station on April 16, 2016. Following extraction from SpaceX’s Dragon cargo craft using the Canadarm2 robotic arm, ground controllers installed the expandable module to the aft port of Tranquility. Astronauts will enter BEAM on an occasional basis to conduct tests to validate the module’s overall performance and the capability of expandable habitats. NASA photo

It’s an unprecedented level of international and commercial collaboration in space, and NASA and its ISS partners – along with several other nations outside the ISS partnership – have begun to discuss a global partnership for human exploration of the solar system beyond low-Earth orbit, using a lunar space station, Gateway, as a staging point.

Establishing a presence on and around the Moon, with an eye toward Mars, will be a monumental undertaking, fraught with technical and logistical challenges that would be daunting for any agency to tackle alone.

In 2019, the world’s first private company astronaut will join a test flight and mission aboard an American-made spacecraft, the Boeing CST-100 Starliner.

Discussions about how to meet those challenges are still in the early stages among experts from NASA and potential domestic and international Gateway partners – and in time, this may represent one of the most important precedents established by the ISS project. In an interview marking the 20th anniversary of the IGA, Lynn Cline, NASA’s lead negotiator for the agreement and the former deputy association administrator for Human Exploration and Operations, reflected on the historical importance of the agreement: “ … it established a framework for all these countries to work together successfully for the long term. What I hope it will have as a legacy for the future is that it’s a stepping-stone in research, in human spaceflight, an evolution to the next step.”

As dramatically as the geopolitical environment has changed since the days of Sputnik, the peaceful uses of space have allowed the world’s best scientists and engineers to work across international lines and achieve astonishing things that, today, many people take for granted. When these partners achieve greater things, establishing a permanent human presence at the Moon and beyond, they’ll be building on a history that recorded the International Space Station as the flagship of peaceful international collaboration in space.