WASHINGTON — A veteran NASA astronaut just back from the International Space Station believes the orbiting facility can operate well past its planned 2030 retirement date — and he wouldn’t mind another trip there.
Don Pettit returned to Earth April 19 (U.S. time) on a Soyuz spacecraft, completing his third long-duration expedition to the station. He spent 220 days in space on this flight and has logged 590 days in orbit in his career, behind only Peggy Whitson and Suni Williams among American astronauts.
Most of those 590 days were spent on the ISS on three expeditions spread over the life of the station: 2002-2003, 2011-2012 and 2024-2025. The ISS has changed drastically since that first mission, when the station was still in the early phases of assembly.
“It’s like living in your house when you’re trying to build it,” he said of that first ISS mission at an April 28 press conference about his latest mission. “NASA was still learning how to run the space station.”
“Now, space station is a well-oiled machine,” he said, citing much greater capabilities and resources there to live and do research. “We’re as efficient as we’ll ever be working on space station, keeping seven people occupied doing mission work.”
NASA plans to retire the ISS at the end of the decade as it shifts to commercial space stations, but Pettit argued there was no technical reason ISS needs to end then. “I’m a firm believer we don’t need to dump space station into the ocean in 2030 if we don’t want to,” he argued, comparing it to the B-52 bomber, which remains in service despite the last of the aircraft being built more than 60 years ago.
“There’s no limit to what we could do to space station except for our will to keep refurbishing it and having the funding necessary for doing it,” he said, such as ongoing work to augment the station’s original solar arrays with newer ones that are smaller but more efficient.
“We can keep station going for as long as we want,” he concluded. “That’s my opinion.”
That opinion clashes with that of NASA’s safety panel, which recently warned of increasing risks to the ISS as it ages. “The ISS has entered the riskiest period of its existence,” said Rich Williams, a member of the Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel, at an April 17 meeting of the committee. He cited concerns about cracks in a Russian module, uncertainties about ISS deorbit plans and constrained budgets.
Pettit’s desire to keep the ISS goes also conflicts with NASA’s ongoing efforts to shift to commercial stations, as well as industry’s desire to set a firm retirement date to provide certainty for their investors and customers.
Pettit said at the briefing that he was recovering well from his latest long-duration spaceflight. He did not look well as he was carried out of the Soyuz spacecraft, and Russian video crews at the landing site took little footage of him after that. “I didn’t look too good because I didn’t feel too good,” he said, including “emptying the contents of my stomach” after landing.
“For someone like me, coming back to Earth has always been a significant challenge,” he said, which he attributed to his physiology. “You go with the flow, you do what your trainers tell you, you do what your flight docs tell you, and you’ll pop out on the other side an Earthling once again.”
Pettit, who turned 70 years old April 20, said he is not interested in retiring. “I’m ready to go back when the flight docs say I’m ready to go back,” he said. “I’ve got a few more good years left. I could see getting another flight or two in.”