The Trump administration wants to let the private sector run U.S. operations on the International Space Station.
Under the administration’s budget proposal, released Monday, NASA would stop paying for the space station by 2025. The proposal calls for $150 million to “encourage commercial development” and tee up companies to take over.
The administration wants to focus on exploring deep space — sending people back to the moon and perhaps beyond. The budget proposal calls for $10 billion to “support human space exploration and to pursue a campaign that would establish U.S. preeminence to, around, and on the Moon.”
Overall, the proposal requests $19.6 billion for NASA, 2.6% more than in the current fiscal year.
The proposal doesn’t call for NASA to abandon the space station entirely. The agency would work with “commercial partners” for research and other projects.
The proposal to privatize the space station doesn’t come as a big shock. Rumors about ending federal funding have circulated for some time, and The Washington Post reported on the plans over the weekend.
It’s up to Congress to pass a budget. So the White House’s proposal is more of a statement of priorities — and not everyone is happy with it.
Republican Senator Ted Cruz, who chairs the Senate Subcommittee on Space, said last week that it had to be “numbskulls” at the Office of Management and Budget who proposed ending federal funding for the space station, The New York Times reported.
And the Commercial Spaceflight Federation, which represents companies like Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin, said defunding the station before 2028 “would not allow sufficient time” for a private sector transition.
The space station is also an international partnership, and it’s not clear what privatizing the U.S. portion would mean for the other countries.
The American lab on board the space station already conducts experiments partly paid for by private industry, but those experiments could get much more expensive if federal funding is cut off.
Right now, all researchers who send experiments to the space station get a free ride and free labor. NASA pays for launch costs and astronauts’ time to run the experiments.
The government-funded Center for the Advancement of Science in Space, which manages the lab, has selected 190 payloads since 2012, and 106 have involved a commercial research project. Drug companies like Merck and Eli Lilly have used the space station to research medications.
CASIS said Monday it doesn’t know what a commercially run space station would look like, but “looks forward to working with both the Administration and Congress on the future of the International Space Station.”
In a statement, the center pledged to keep working to educate the public on “the critical role this research platform plays in the development of a robust and sustainable economy in low Earth orbit.”
Other companies are already involved in space station operations. SpaceX and Orbital ATK have contracts with NASA to complete supply missions without crews.
SpaceX and Boeing are also developing spacecrafts to send astronauts to and from the space station. The proposed budget would continue support for those endeavors, NASA acting administrator Robert Lightfoot said Monday.