The International Space Station (ISS) is due to retire soon, plunging into the South Pacific Ocean after being dragged down through Earth’s atmosphere. But perhaps not all of the space station will be lost, with Russia announcing new plans to reuse its segment of the ISS for its own orbital station.
Russia has reluctantly agreed to keep its cosmonauts on board the ISS until 2028, after which the Roscosmos space agency plans to turn its focus toward the Russian Orbital Space Station, nicknamed ROSS. The initial idea was to launch new modules to orbit beginning in 2027, but a recent statement from a Russian official revealed a twist.
Rather than launching seven new modules to orbit, Russia wants to keep its existing segments already attached to the ISS to establish an orbital habitat for its cosmonauts. “The Scientific and Technical Council of Roscosmos supported this proposal and approved the deployment of a Russian orbital station as part of the Russian segment of the ISS as the main possible scenario,” Oleg Orlov, director of the Institute of Biomedical Problems at the Russian Academy of Sciences, recently announced.
New idea, same parts
Russia has assigned a special commission for its revised ROSS concept, and it’s been working on the idea for the past several months, according to Orlov. He added that ROSS would be separated following the retirement of the ISS in 2030, attaching new modules to the core after that.
The original plan was to launch the space station’s first module by 2027 and follow it up with three modules by 2030 and another three by 2035. Russia had planned on making its space station habitable by 2028.
The recent alteration to ROSS may reflect a necessary decision, as Russia’s space program has suffered in recent years due to geopolitical tension with its space partners following the invasion of Ukraine. Russia had previously threatened to pull out of the ISS after 2024 in order to focus on the construction of its own space station. Roscosmos officials later downplayed the threats, confirming that the agency would continue to support ISS operations until 2028.
The Russian module is currently not in its best shape. In 2019, Roscosmos first reported an air leak from its ISS segment, tracing it to the vestibule (named PrK) that connects a docking port to the Russian Zvezda module, which the space agency had launched to low Earth orbit in July 2000.
Since then, the rate at which the air is leaking has doubled from one pound a day to a little over two pounds a day. Earlier in June, NASA was forced to postpone the launch of the private Axiom 4 mission to the ISS, which was originally scheduled for June 11, citing a new pressure signal in the Zvezda module.
The ISS has been in operation for more than two decades, with its hardware enduring the harsh space environment while bacteria builds up inside. Russia’s plan to recycle its old segments may not be fully confronting the challenges—or the reality—of the situation.
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