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.
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