As the Kremlin threatens to unleash atomic weapons in its battle to take over democratic Ukraine, and develops nuclear-armed spacecraft to challenge the allied space powers, one rising aerospace outfit says its new space station will be a symbol of international peace and camaraderie when launched into the heavens.
The American co-founders of Starlab Space, who have formed an alliance with European, Canadian and Japanese space-tech leaders, predict their orbiting station could help keep the celestial peace despite the armed clashes and nuclear brinkmanship now upending the Earth.
The Starlab Space Station is first and foremost a hyper-modern habitat and science lab, designed to enable astronauts around the world to conduct experiments in microgravity or deploy imaging satellites, all while circling the planet at 28,000 kilometres per hour.
Yet Starlab, modelled after the International Space Station and designed to help replace the ISS when that station is decommissioned in 2031, is like its forebear a microcosmic United Nations in space.
Starlab Space LLC - a joint venture created by U.S.-based Voyager Space with Europe’s Airbus - has already forged a pact with the European Space Agency to host ESA astronauts and spacecraft in what could be the globe’s first independent space station. Expanding their joint venture to include Japanese rocket designer Mitsubishi Corporation and Canadian space robotics inventor MDA is also likely to attract astronauts from those two space-power states to the Starlab Station.
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So far NASA has awarded Voyager $217 million under a Space Act Agreement to develop Starlab as the agency counts down to retiring the ISS, but NASA wants the internationalist zeitgeist of the ISS to live on across the independent stations that will succeed it.
“One of the greatest successes of the ISS is its international cooperation,” says Jeffrey Manber, President of International and Space Stations at Voyager Space. “NASA wants to see this international alliance continued,” he told me in an interview.
But Moscow’s repeated threats to begin shooting down the imaging satellites, launched by Planet Labs and Maxar, that are sending back high-resolution imagery in real time of the Russian tanks invading Ukraine, and the SpaceX Starlink spacecraft beaming broadband internet coverage across the besieged country, are killing off any future for Kremlin collaboration with the democratic space powers, Manber says.
With Starlab, he adds, “We intend to replicate the ISS partnership on a commercial basis but without the Russians.”
The Kremlin’s top-secret race to launch nuclear-armed spacecraft into orbit, uncovered by American intelligence agencies but denied by President Vladimir Putin, is sealing its status as a pariah state among the allied space agencies.
General Thomas Ayres, a cofounder of the U.S. Space Force who is now Chief Legal Officer at Starlab Space, says the entire realm of low Earth orbit, including the ISS and NASA’s masterplan to foster a new generation of commercial space stations, could be jeopardized by “warfare in space or the detonation of a nuclear bomb in space.”
General Ayres told me across a series of interviews that the White House should trumpet the message to Moscow that any armed attack on a U.S. constellation of satellites would be regarded as “an act of war.”
These red lines would apply to Russia’s launching a conventional anti-satellite missile to destroy an American satellite, or to the detonation of a nuclear warhead in space that takes out an entire swath of U.S. spacecraft.
“Clear red lines are a good thing when you’re thinking about a counter-strategy with Russia,” says General Ayres, who co-drafted the founding legislation setting up the U.S. Space Force, and then became its first General Counsel.
But Manber suggests Moscow’s ongoing role as a partner in the ISS, and the planned lofting of a constellation of multi-nation space stations, could deter Russian strategic rocket forces from targeting orbiting spacecraft despite the nuclear saber-rattling.
“Crewed space stations may well deter an impulsive attack on low Earth orbit assets,” says Manber, who might have the deepest insights into Russia’s space hierarchy of anyone in the U.S., or the entire Western world, because he was once a high-ranking leader in that hierarchy.
During the halcyon days of Boris Yeltsin’s liberal democracy in Russia, when the rebel-turned-president presided over a frenetic rush to end Soviet-era state controls over the economy, even the floating Mir Space Station was privatized, and Manber co-headed a Western space venture that leased the Mir, intending to create the first-ever orbital station open to space tourists worldwide.
The Russian designers of Mir, at the space-tech colossus Energia, later appointed Manber to a high-echelon post inside Energia, and he represented Russia in its contract negotiations with NASA to co-construct the ISS.
Manber, who chronicled his life as a courtier of Russia’s capitalist space czars in the fascinating book Selling Peace: Inside the Soviet Conspiracy That Transformed the U.S. Space Program, says while the free-wheeling, pro-Western phase of Russia’s evolution has disappeared like a fleeting mirage, Roscosmos hasn’t halted its space partnership on the ISS with the liberal democracies, and might still want to prevent an eternal breach.
He lauds the ISS as a celestial icon of peace - one that could still be constraining the Kremlin’s impulse to strike the space players now aiding Ukraine.
Manber adds he was an ardent backer of the campaign - spearheaded by former Vice President Al Gore - to award the ISS the Nobel Peace Prize a decade ago.
“Without a doubt,” he says, “the Space Station deserved the Nobel Prize in the post-Cold War era as multiple governments achieved an unprecedented oasis of international cooperation.”
Fast-forward to today, while the ISS coalition “hasn’t prevented the current conflict between the ISS partners,” he says, “the peaceful nature of the Space Station endures, and perhaps as a deterrent for dangerous activities in space.”
As the future unfolds, with independent stations following the ISS into orbit, they could amplify that effect. “The more stations, from multiple nations, the better for keeping the peace.”
“Perhaps multiple space stations may well prevent satellites from being destroyed from nuclear weapons,” he adds, with Starlab joining this pro-peace force.
These days, the ISS still deserves to win the Nobel Peace Prize, says Dylan Taylor, Voyager CEO and Chairman.
“The ISS remains an incredible example of what humanity can achieve when we work together toward common goals,” he told me in an interview.
“The ISS not only advanced scientific knowledge, but served as a powerful symbol of peace and unity.”
“The ISS has functioned as a neutral zone and a beacon of peaceful cooperation in low-Earth orbit,” he says. “Its very existence has fostered a unique environment where countries including the United States and Russia work side by side despite conflicts on Earth.”
“Our goal is to build Starlab on the same foundation of international cooperation that made the ISS such a success,” he says. “We will strive to uphold and enhance the legacy of the ISS.”
This utopian vision of Earth’s closest orbital zone becoming populated and protected by a constellation of peace-promoting space stations, sketched out by Starlab’s top leaders, might account for Starlab’s pole-star ability to attract space allies around the world.
ESA Director General Josef Aschbacher personally led the European Space Agency’s negotiations to collaborate with Starlab and Airbus in the run-up to the Space Station’s projected launch in 2028, says General Ayres.
Aschbacher aims to ensure ESA astronauts have an alternative, post-ISS destination to explore in orbit, and to push forward his goal of EU rocket designers developing human spacecraft that would give European test pilots independent access to space.
The compact Starlab Space forged with ESA’s Director General specifically guarantees “access to the Starlab Space Station for ESA and its Member States, for astronaut missions and sustained long-term research activities,” and for projected visits by ESA-developed crew capsules.
“This agreement,” Manber says, “means Starlab is partly a European Space Station.”
NASA already envisions flying its astronauts to Starlab, and the Canadian and Japanese space agencies could quickly follow suit.
Meanwhile the Starlab Space Station, set to be launched aboard SpaceX’s revolutionary Starship spacecraft, features sleek curvilinear interiors holding astronauts quarters and a suite of labs - for low-gravity experiments in astrophysics, bioastronautics, space botany and an open workbench - with a design that echoes the futuristic orbiter in Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece 2001: A Space Odyssey.
This Starlab Space Station should actually be called Starlab 1, says Jeffrey Manber. Starlab 2 might be a floating hotel for space tourists, he says, while “Starlab 3 could be a robotics factory in orbit.”
