Saturday, October 11, 2025

Opinions: Salvaging the space station's scrap metal

10/11/2025

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By Dan Robitzski

Welcome back to our weekly newsletter highlighting the opinions and perspectives of the SpaceNews community.

The International Space Station, photographed in 2021. Credit: NASA

Utilizing the International Space Station as a resource

The SpaceNews opinions desk is no stranger to the space community's calls to save, salvage or preserve the International Space Station, which is set to be decommissioned and destroyed during a controlled reentry in the coming years as NASA embraces commercial companies building new stations.

This week we published another, written by Lunexus Space founder Greg Vialle, who argued that the ISS decommissioning plan simply doesn't make financial or logical sense given the space industry's push to embrace on orbit manufacturing, asteroid mining and other means of assembling infrastructure off-planet.

Setting aside the cultural and other intangible reasons some have argued we should keep the ISS in orbit, Vialle's argument is simple and pragmatic.

As he wrote, "NASA plans to spend approximately $1 billion of taxpayer money to destroy the International Space Station in 2030. The ISS contains over $1.5 billion worth of space-grade materials already in orbit. Instead of throwing this asset away, we should redirect that funding to develop the technology to recycle it. This approach saves a valuable asset, prevents wasteful spending and seeds a new, American-led industry in space, ensuring our economic and strategic leadership over competitors like China."

Vialle notes that the ISS is made of hundreds of tons of high-grade aluminum, titanium and other materials.

"Based on current launch costs, that material is worth over $1.5 billion, if kept in space. At the bottom of the ocean, worthless."

Read the full article here.

A call to arms for British space investors

The United Kingdom is taking strides to bolster its military and defense investments in space, but the public funding being made available for the U.K.'s space startups isn't enough to do the job, argued Mark Wheatley, founder of Delano Wheatley Consulting, and Air Marshal Andrew Turner, former Deputy Commander of the Royal Air Force.

In a recent opinion article, they call on London-based investors to get off of the sidelines and make the private investments necessary to mobilize the U.K.'s financial strength in the interest of space security and leadership.

"The government will remain the backbone of national defense, but our view is that resilience in the contested domains can't be built by the state alone," they wrote. "It requires partnership between ministers, financiers, industry and innovators. Acting together, we can make up the lost ground and build a world-leading defense sector."

You can see the rest of the article here.

How can Golden Dome outlive a Trump presidency?

When President Trump leaves office, what will happen to his signature space project, the Golden Dome? Military contractors and subcontractors have shown abundant interest in the program. But there's the chance that the whole thing collapses depending on regime changes, especially given the likelihood of schedule delays and budget overruns, Henry Sokolski, executive director of the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center, wrote in a recent opinion piece.

For the program to survive, Sokolski concluded, one of two things should happen:

"If the Space Force lofts a 'working' space-based interceptor constellation of any sort by 2028, the Republicans could lock the program in no matter who wins the White House in 2029."

Or, the project could be reframed to "provide what's been missing in U.S. arms control diplomacy now for at least a decade — leverage" over Russia and China, as a means to enforce arms control and space agreements.

You can see the full article here.

SpaceNews is committed to publishing our community's diverse perspectives. Whether you're an academic, executive, engineer or even just a concerned citizen of the cosmos, send your arguments and viewpoints to opinion@spacenews.com to be considered for publication online or in our next magazine. The perspectives shared in these opinion articles are solely those of the authors.

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