Missing the point of ISS

December 2024

In his October Editor’s Notebook, “Finishing strong,” Ben Iannotta wrote that the International Space Station program has had “no moderating effect on Russia.” Associate Fellow Jim Van Laak wrote to offer a different view:

To be honest, I think you missed the forest for the trees. No doubt you are too young to have many memories of the Cold War, but as someone who lived at the tip of the spear at its height, it was one of the most significant aspects of the 20th century. The advent of nuclear weapons at the end of WWII gave humanity the ability to extinguish human life on this planet, but not the wisdom to avoid this fate. Never before had humanity faced such a threat, which my generation was forced to confront directly. Imagine if your 8-year-old children were doing “Duck and Cover” drills in school and your parents were debating whether a fallout shelter was sufficient or a blast shelter was required in the basement.

When Space Station Freedom was created in 1984, it was a typical NASA program to extend our reach with a long-term presence in space. Unfortunately, it lacked a vision worthy of the cost and a management team worthy of our trust. When Bill Clinton was elected with the promise to balance the budget, it was soon on the chopping block. Dan Goldin negotiated the opportunity to lower the cost and increase the value of the effort, resulting in the International Space Station. The redesign itself was uninspired, but the decision to add our former Cold War adversaries elevated the pedestrian to the sublime. For those of us who had seen the nuclear threat in intimate detail, it was a breakthrough moment and a powerful personal motivator.

I was one of the original leaders of the new station program (brilliantly named Alpha and later renamed ISS), given the job of finding a programmatic and technical approach to integrating this foreign element into the remains of the Freedom design. In 2014, ISS was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, and I am confident it will win when it is retired.

ISS also has taught us some powerful lessons about how to succeed in space. Its approach to building a huge system in flight, maintaining reliability and function as elements are added and moved around, opens the door to entirely new visions of exploration systems. The experience of keeping people safe and healthy in space is irreplaceable.

Jim Van Laak, AIAA Associate Fellow 

Poquoson, Virginia

Jim was an Air Force fighter pilot before joining NASA in 1990 and becoming the director of risk management on the Space Station Alpha Program at Johnson Space Center in Texas.

Author’s response: I do have strong memories of the Cold War. In college, most of my dorm watched “The Day After” on TV in 1983. Let’s not go back to that. — Ben Iannotta