A SpaceX Crew Dragon approaches the station in March carrying the Crew-4 astronauts. Credit: NASA
AIAA ASCEND, Las Vegas — The proposed cuts to science and research activities during the International Space Station’s remaining years threaten NASA’s plan to transition those activities to the future class of commercial space stations after 2030. That was the warning delivered here Thursday by panelists representing a variety of companies who provide transportation services to ISS or rely on the station as a research platform.
“We’re anxious to be part of the next generation,” said Daniel Tani, a former astronaut who now serves as Northrop Grumman’s director of business development for human exploration operations. “We just need to make sure that we can survive that transition.”
NASA plans to retire ISS in 2030 and become a customer on one or more of the private space stations in development by a handful of companies. To set up that transition, the Trump administration wants to reduce the number of astronauts onboard and the amount of research conducted at a given time, and instead “focus on maintaining safe operations of ISS at a minimal level,” the fiscal 2026 budget request reads.
Though fiscal 2025 funding for ISS totaled $1.2 billion, the White House is seeking $920 million for fiscal ’26 and every year of the station’s remaining operations.
Even before the White House released its budget, NASA was looking at reducing the crew size of future flights from four astronauts to three, due to a “cumulative multi-year budget reduction,” Dana Weigel, ISS program manager, said during a mid-May media conference.
“That has left us with some budget and resource challenges that result in less cargo,” she said. The agency plans to conduct three cargo flights in fiscal 2025, compared to the five that have been more typical in recent years.
In the view of several panelists, that reduced cadence could establish a level of demand far below what would be required to sustain the private stations — and in a worst-case scenario, threatens U.S. leadership in low-Earth orbit.
“I have no doubt that we’re at the beginning of a new era” with in-space biomedical research and other industries that stand to benefit from microgravity, said Mike Gold, president of RedWire Space’s civil and international space business unit. “The only question is, will those benefits be seen here in the U.S. and the free world, or is it going to occur in China?”
One solution might be “industrial diplomacy,” said Jared Stout, chief global policy officer at Axiom Space. “I think the future of LEO looks like our company working with companies in other countries to build up an ecosystem that can be sustained absent any particular governments, political decisions this way or that way. I think we have to figure out how we make those investments on our side and then go get government customers or get government investment.”
The four private missions Axiom has so far sent to ISS are an example of this, he said. The three crew members of last month’s Ax-4 flight were from Hungary, India and Poland — countries that have not sent anyone to space since their 1970s and ’80s flights aboard Russian Soyuz capsules.
“Those are intangible but very powerful things that we can do to build that LEO ecosystem with our partners, and get their industry, their scientific community involved in what’s going on with microgravity research,” Stout said.
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