Space Station Museum

Recently, there was news about how the International Space Station will one day be deorbited.  And this was met with cries of “Can’t it just be boosted into a higher orbit,” or, “Can’t it be turned into a museum?” and other such things.  And my knee-jerk reaction is that it should be preserved as a historic “building.” But then reality kicked in.  The station is getting old and there’s no telling how long some parts of it will stay safe.  Having a controlled reentry after all the crew and science are taken off is infinitely better than a catastrophic break up with crew – or tourists – onboard leaving a huge debris cloud that could damage satellites or other stations. 

While thinking on all of this, I realized that the ISS could live again someday as part of a museum.  This would be in orbit – as part of an even larger space station – and would start with models of everything: from spacecraft like the Vostok capsule of Yuri Gagarin, to the Space Shuttle, to the Chinese Shenzhou, as well as all the space stations from Skylab and Mir and the ISS.  And then there would be the full size versions, so the tourists could try to cram into a Mercury capsule or just float around in Mir.  These wouldn’t be a full recreation, there wouldn’t be any need for solar panels for example, just the interior space.  Any views out windows would just be video screens showing what would have been seen.  And since this would be in zero-g, you could cram things in any orientation they could fit.  Like you could have the Crew Dragon mockup squeezed in between the Tiangong and Salyut 1 mockups.  And this museum wouldn’t be the entirety of the complex.  Like you could be inside the Skylab section, and just on the other side of the bulkhead would be the linen closet for a hotel. 

While it will be a sad day when the ISS is deorbited, hopefully it will be replaced with bigger and better stations.  And while these replacements will primarily be used for science, they will one day be replaced with even bigger, even better stations that will still do science but will also hold tourists.  And as more and more humans live and work in space, hopefully someone will eventually build a space station museum so that future generations can marvel at how “small” the ISS was.