Flood the ISS as soon as possible: why Musk is right and why Soviet cosmonauts referred to orbital stations as "steam engines."

When Elon Musk posted on his social media that the ISS should be deorbited "as soon as possible," not everyone grasped what he meant. After all, it is his company that earns over a billion dollars a year transporting astronauts to and from the station. Supposedly, he will also receive a nice sum in 2030 for sinking the ISS. Why rush this event?

“It’s time to start preparations for deorbiting the space station. It has served its purpose. There is very little additional benefit from it. Let’s go to Mars.”

Journalist Eric Berger asked him: what does "as soon as possible" mean? He clarified: “It’s up to the president to decide, but my recommendation is as soon as possible. I suggest — in two years.”

By 2027, there will be no orbital station to replace the ISS. Neither Russia nor the USA will have one. The only real American player capable of creating an orbital station in the coming years is SpaceX, but it has entirely different priorities: the first Starship spacecraft equipped with life support systems will be sent to the Moon.

Since these spacecraft have the same pressurized volume as the ISS but are significantly better in terms of size, Musk will undoubtedly profit from renting them out as orbital stations — periodically landing back on Earth. However, this is not his immediate business plan; it is unlikely that he will get to that this decade. It seems that a space enthusiast wants to leave humanity without its only major international orbital station.

Understandably, this has sparked a very negative reaction from both NASA and other concerned citizens. The general arguments against the idea of "sinking the ISS!" are straightforward. European countries, Russia, and Japan will have no objects in space to which they could fly in 2027. However, all human skills that go unused tend to rust. The Americans know this well from their own experience: their own spacesuits regularly flooding astronauts on the ISS serve as a living example of such a dulled sword.

It’s no surprise that everyone except Musk publicly calls this foolishness. In a statement regarding the matter, NASA directly stated: we intend to use the station for scientific purposes and as a training ground for flights to the Moon and Mars.

However, before agreeing with NASA, it’s worth noting that Musk is far from the first to call for abandoning permanently manned orbital stations in favor of heading to Mars. Here are two quotes from cosmonaut Grechko:

“In 1978, when we broke the record for flight duration, I wrote in my report that a permanently manned orbital station is not an optimal solution. Its efficiency is like that of a steam locomotive... Orbital stations have very low efficiency, just a few percent. There’s much to discuss regarding why this is the case.”

And the second:

“I believe that the general direction of manned flights is Mars... A human is a human because he is always drawn to the horizon. In doing so, he expands the horizon for humanity. An animal, if it has food, warmth, and a mate nearby, needs nothing more. So, we either remain human and fly to Mars, or we become animals.”

Georgy Grechko

Perhaps Musk's position is a bit more thought-out than it seems at first glance?

Why reduce radiation norms drastically?

In fact, Elon Musk's dissatisfaction with the orbital station runs much deeper than it appears. To understand this, it’s worth looking back at NASA's history over the past decade. Recall that until humanity had any means of traveling to the Red Planet on the horizon, the agency had the same radiation norms as during the lunar race. A person was allowed to receive 500 millisieverts per year and four thousand over a lifetime.

However, in the early 2020s, the situation changed: NASA abruptly altered its radiation standards. Citing gender neutrality, they were reduced to 600 millisieverts for an entire career.

It’s important to emphasize that there’s no new scientific data, nor any old data, indicating that the previous safety norms were too dangerous. There are exactly zero scientific studies showing this, whether from experiments on animals or observations of astronauts.

And the scientific works that do exist have found something entirely different: among 360 studied American astronauts, deaths from cancer were 38 percent less than among "ordinary" Americans (and equally rare as among professional athletes). However, readers of Naked Science will hardly be shocked by these figures: we have previously detailed how people who accidentally received moderate (but higher than on orbit) long-term doses of radiation in Taiwan died from cancer much less frequently than citizens of the same state who were not exposed to such radiation.

Similar results have been shown by experiments on animals since the 1950s. Russian scientists have recently discovered positive effects of cosmic levels of radiation on the cognitive abilities of rodents. However, studies that attempted to demonstrate the harmfulness of radiation for experimental animals employed very crude manipulations, exposing them to instantaneous doses at the level of Hiroshima, rather than moderate long-term doses of penetrating radiation, as would occur in real space.

Many scientists attribute this seemingly strange effect of moderate radiation to radiation hormesis: when faced with radiation, the body significantly activates its immune system, which begins to better track and destroy cancer cells that appear in healthy individuals daily. As a result, cancer mortality in people is notably lower.

Of course, if immunity is detuned by complete isolation in a hermetically sealed building, as in some experiments on rats, then such an effect will not occur, but real astronauts, like all earthlings, live in a different environment. It’s no wonder that after missions to orbit, astronauts die from cancer less often than "ordinary" citizens.

All these long-known scientific facts naturally raise the question: how did NASA suddenly revise its radiation standards?

You won’t hear an open answer (aside from the comical official version about gender neutrality). However, some NASA employees can be found, who, on condition of anonymity, will tell you that they believe the reason for such a revision is very simple: no one in government offices wants to send people to Mars.

Flight to Mars: “It’s impossible... even with the nuclear engines we are developing for space”

Whether this is true is difficult to confirm or deny. However, it is known that the head of, for example, the Russian state is being deliberately or unconsciously misinformed on the same issue. Thus, in February 2025, he stated:

“Some colleagues tell me that it’s impossible (to send a living cell to Mars. — NS). Once upon a time, Korolev thought about this, he said that it was necessary to fly in a water shell, then the cell would reach there and back, but this is impossible because the device turns out to be so huge that it cannot be launched or transported there even with the help of the nuclear engines we are developing for space. It becomes a large apparatus. There are no other materials that would protect the biological material, the living cell.”

In fact, Korolev did not “think,” but created a fully operational project for a flight to Mars. Moreover, the apparatus for this, the Heavy Interplanetary Ship, had already been worked out in full-scale ground models and weighed 500 tons, not much more than the current ISS. And this was despite the fact that it indeed had a radiation shelter, the hollow walls of which were filled with water.

Measured levels of radiation by American rovers on the way to Mars and on the planet showed a total dose for a manned expedition following Musk's “scheme” (three-month flight) of 800 millisieverts (165 on the way there, the same back, and 230 for a year spent on the planet). In other words, NASA's norms until 2021 did not contradict a flight there according to Musk's scheme. Not just for a cell, but for a full-fledged astronaut as well.

Whoever is responsible for reducing NASA's radiation norms by seven times, whoever is feeding the head of state the line about “but this is impossible because the apparatus turns out to be so huge that it cannot be launched or transported there even with the help of the nuclear engines we are developing for space,” cannot be defeated by rational arguments. We have already explained why rational arguments in space exploration lose out to the ability to sweet-talk the leadership, so we won't repeat ourselves.

Depriving Hope

But what if you deprive the people who can sweet-talk of their daily bread? What if you leave NASA's human spaceflight specialists without an orbital station? When the only alternative to a flight to Mars will be their dismissal?

This measure, especially in the United States, is very effective