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Airbus is forming a joint venture with US start-up Voyager to compete to build a replacement for the International Space Station, an internationally funded laboratory in space that is due to be decommissioned by the end of the decade.
The deal announced on Wednesday formalises the partnership unveiled in January on Voyager’s Starlab project and will see Airbus replace US defence company Lockheed Martin as its main industrial partner.
Starlab is one of the frontrunners in a race launched by Nasa four years ago to develop commercial alternatives to the ISS, which was launched 23 years ago and orbits some 420 kms above the earth.
The ISS is an international collaboration, funded by national space agencies from the US, EU, Canada, Japan and Russia. Since its launch it has hosted 258 astronauts and cosmonauts from 20 countries.
Among the other contenders in the race trying to build a replacement is Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin, which is leading a consortium offering a 30,000 sq ft “ecosystem” of different habitats and services for industry, research and tourism.
Nasa has allocated $550mn to four consortiums in the first phase of the competition, which will examine the spacecraft design and the business cases of each contender. The US agency has insisted each be commercially viable.
Airbus’s entry into the contest may ease European concerns over the region’s access to a space habitat once the ISS is retired. It could also dampen potential criticism about European governments using taxpayer funds to pay US companies for access to commercial space stations.
Jean-Marc Nasr, head of space systems at Airbus, said on Wednesday that the partnership “aligns the interests of both ourselves and Voyager and our respective space agencies”.
Airbus declined to disclose whether it would invest financially in a project that is expected to cost several billion dollars, and where there remains much uncertainty over the final demand for commercial services. The joint venture will be US-led, said Mike Schoellhorn, chief executive of Airbus Defence and Space.
Alongside Starlab and the Blue Origin consortium, Axiom Space is bidding to expand the module it already has attached to the ISS into a vehicle hosting activities from research to tourism and astronaut training. US defence and space company Northrop Grumman wants to build a platform that can be used for training or science projects.
Nasa is expected to choose at least two designs by around 2025, when it will agree firm service contracts — subject to certification — with the winner or winners. The prize is to secure an anchor contract from Nasa, which spends roughly $400mn a year doing research on the ISS, according to Voyager chair Dylan Taylor.
But analysts estimate the operating costs of a commercial space station are likely to top $1bn a year, meaning the rivals will have to find other customers.
Many experts have raised questions about whether there will be sufficient commercial demand to sustain more than one privately funded station. A report published in 2017 by the Washington DC-based Science and Technology Policy Institute concluded that only under the most optimistic cost and revenue scenarios could the stations be commercially viable without sustained space agency support.
Since then, the report’s author, Keith Crane, has concluded that “private sector demand for goods and services from space has not really materialised”.
However, Taylor insisted that the market would accelerate once commercial stations were in operation. “We are very, very confident that the business plan closes. If you just take commercial business done on the ISS today that easily supports a single commercial space station,” he said. “If you fast forward the clock from 2023 to 2033 do you think there will be more commercial space activity or less?”
Schoellhorn was equally bullish. “Don’t forget about dual use, military use of space stations as well. If you put all that together we are pretty confident.”
Lockheed Martin’s replacement by Airbus as Voyager’s main industrial partner coincided with a change in Starlab’s planned design from an inflatable model based on Lockheed designs to a metallic structure.
In April, Airbus unveiled a concept for a slick sci-fi style space station called Loop. Elements of Loop would be incorporated into the new Starlab design, Schoellhorn said.
