Above Earth’s Wars, Starlab aims to be the orbital beacon of peace

As the Kremlin threatens to unleash nuclear weapons in its battle to seize democratic Ukraine and develops nuclear-armed spacecraft to challenge allied space forces, a fledgling aerospace group says its new space station will be a symbol of international peace and camaraderie when soar into the skies.

The American co-founders of Starlab Space, who have formed an alliance with European, Canadian and Japanese space technology leaders, predict that their orbiting station could help maintain celestial peace despite the armed conflicts and nuclear standoff that now roil Earth .

The Starlab Space Station is first and foremost a state-of-the-art habitat and science laboratory, designed to allow astronauts around the world to conduct experiments in microgravity or develop imaging satellites, all while circling the planet at 28,000 kilometers per hour time.

But Starlab, modeled after the International Space Station and designed to help replace the ISS when that station is decommissioned in 2031, is like its ancestor a microcosmic UN in space.

Starlab Space LLC – a joint venture formed by US Voyager Space with Europe’s Airbus – has already struck a deal with the European Space Agency to host ESA astronauts and spacecraft on what could be the first independent space station of the planet. The expansion of their joint venture to include Japanese rocket designer Mitsubishi Aerospace and Canadian space robotics inventor MDA is likely to attract astronauts from these two space-faring states to the Starlab Station.

So far NASA has awarded Voyager $217 million under a Space Act agreement to develop Starlab as the agency counts down to the retirement of the ISS, but NASA wants the ISS’s international zeitgeist to live on in its independent successor stations .

“One of the greatest successes of the ISS is its international collaboration,” says Jeffrey Manber, President of International and Space Stations at Voyager Space. “NASA wants to see this international alliance continue,” he told me in an interview.

But Moscow’s repeated threats to begin shooting down imaging satellites, launched by Planet and Maxar, which send high-resolution real-time images of Russian tanks invading Ukraine and SpaceX spacecraft that broadcast broadband Internet coverage to the whole besieged country. killing any future for Kremlin cooperation with democratic space forces, Manber says.

With Starlab, he says, “We intend to repeat the ISS partnership on a commercial basis, but without the Russians.”

The Kremlin’s top-secret race to launch nuclear-armed spacecraft into orbit, revealed by US intelligence but denied by President Vladimir Putin, seals its status as a pariah state among allied space agencies.

General Thomas Ayres, co-founder of the US Space Force, who is now chief legal officer at Voyager Space, says the entire realm of low Earth orbit, including NASA’s master plan and the ISS to advance a new generation of commercial space stations, could be compromised. “War in space or detonation of a nuclear bomb in space.”

General Ayres told me in a series of interviews that the White House should trumpet the message to Moscow that any armed attack on a US constellation of satellites would be considered an “act of war.”

Those red lines would apply to Russia launching a conventional anti-satellite missile to destroy a US satellite or detonating a nuclear warhead in space that takes out an entire array of US spacecraft.

“Clear red lines are a good thing when you’re thinking about a counterstrategy with Russia,” says General Ayres, who authored the founding legislation to create the US Space Force and later became its first general counsel.

But Manber suggests that Moscow’s continued role as a partner on the ISS, and the planned creation of a constellation of multinational space stations, could prevent Russia’s strategic missile forces from targeting orbiting spacecraft despite a nuclear strike.

“Manned space stations may well prevent an impulsive attack on assets in low Earth orbit,” says Manber, who may have the deepest knowledge of Russia’s space hierarchy of anyone in the US or the entire West. world, because it once was high ranking leader in this hierarchy.

During the days of Boris Yeltsin’s liberal democracy in Russia, when the revolutionary-turned-president presided over a mad rush to end Soviet-era state controls on the economy, even the Mir floating space station was privatized and Manber co-headed a Western space company that leased Mir, intending to create the world’s first orbital station open to space tourists.

Mir’s Russian designers, at space technology giant Energia, later appointed Manber to a senior position within Energiaand led negotiations for Russia’s contract with NASA to co-build the ISS.

Manber, who recounted his life as a courtier of Russia’s capitalist space czars in the gripping book Selling Peace: Inside the Soviet conspiracy that transformed the US space programsays while Russia’s liberal, pro-Western phase of evolution has vanished like a fleeting mirage, Roscosmos has not stopped its space cooperation on the ISS with liberal democracies and may still want to prevent an eternal breach.

He praises the ISS as a celestial icon of peace — something that could still curb the Kremlin’s urge to crack down on space players now helping Ukraine.

Manber adds that he was a strong supporter of the campaign – led by former Vice President Al Gore – awards ISS the Nobel Peace Prize a decade ago.

“Without a doubt,” he says, “the Space Station deserved a Nobel Prize in the post-Cold War era, as many governments achieved an unprecedented oasis of international cooperation.”

Fast forward to today, while the ISS coalition “has not prevented the current conflict between ISS partners,” he says, “the peaceful nature of the Space Station remains, and perhaps as a deterrent to dangerous activities in space.”

As the future unfolds, he adds, with independent stations following the ISS in orbit, they could amplify this phenomenon. “The more stations, from many nations, the better for keeping the peace.”

“Perhaps many space stations may well prevent the destruction of satellites by nuclear weapons,” he adds, with Starlab joining this force for peace.

These days, the ISS still deserves to win the Nobel Peace Prize, he says Dylan TaylorCEO and President of Voyager.

“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 acted as a buffer zone and a beacon of peaceful cooperation in low Earth orbit,” he says. “Its very existence has created 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 so successful,” he says. “We will strive to support and enhance the legacy of the ISS.”

This utopian vision of Earth’s near-orbital zone inhabited and protected by a constellation of peace-promoting space stations, envisioned by Starlab’s top leaders, may explain Starlab’s ability to attract space allies across continents.

ESA Director General Josef Aschbacher personally led the European Space Agency’s negotiations to work with Starlab and Airbus ahead of the planned 2028 launch of the Space Station, General Ayres says.

Aschbacher aims to ensure ESA astronauts have an alternative destination after the ISS to explore in orbit and further his goal EU rocket designers developing human spaceships which would give European test pilots independent access to space.

The Starlab Space compact created with ESA’s Director General specifically guarantees “access to the Starlab space station for ESA and its Member States, for astronaut missions and continued long-term research activities” and for scheduled visits by crew capsules deployed by the ESA.

“This deal,” says Manber, “means that Starlab is part 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, to be launched aboard SpaceX’s revolutionary Starship spacecraft, features a sleek curvilinear interior for astronauts and a suite of laboratories – for low-gravity experiments in physics, biology, space botany and an open bench of work – with a design that echoes the futuristic orbital in Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Jeffrey Manber says this Starlab Space Station should actually be called Starlab 1. Starlab 2 could be a floating hotel for space tourists, he says, while “Starlab 3 could be an orbiting robotics factory.”