Cold to Commercial

The International Space Station wasn’t built on trust. It was built on the ruins of distrust, which turns out to be a more durable foundation.

That distinction matters more than most accounts of the ISS acknowledge. The station is routinely described as a triumph of international cooperation, a symbol of what humanity can achieve when it sets aside its differences. That’s true, and it misses the point. The ISS exists because self-interest, it turns out, is a more reliable architect than goodwill.

Issue 04 of The View from Space argued that the weightless cold war is already underway. Issue 05 makes the next argument: that we’ve seen this before, we know how it ends, and the ending is more interesting than the conflict.

The Cold War in Space Was Real

It’s easy, with distance, to romanticise the Space Race. Two great powers, competing for the heavens. Sputnik. Gagarin. Armstrong. The drama is real. What gets softened in the retelling is how genuinely dangerous it was.

Both superpowers tested anti-satellite weapons. Both developed military space programmes alongside the civilian ones the world was watching. The 1967 Outer Space Treaty — which banned weapons of mass destruction in orbit and prohibited sovereignty claims over celestial bodies — wasn’t a gesture of goodwill. It was an arms control agreement born of mutual terror. Both sides recognised that an unregulated space race could produce outcomes neither wanted. So they agreed on minimum rules, not because they trusted each other, but because the alternative was worse.

That treaty, signed at the height of the Cold War, is the same document that now governs a space environment with dozens of state actors, hundreds of private companies, and two competing lunar programmes racing for the same crater. It was written for two players. It is being asked to referee a much larger game.

The Moment the Cold War Became Something Else

On November 9, 1989, the Berlin Wall came down. The Soviet Union dissolved two years later. What followed in space was not a victory lap for the West — it was a scramble.

Russia inherited Mir, the Soviet space station, and a workforce of engineers, cosmonauts, and scientists who had built one of the most sophisticated space programmes in history.

It also inherited an economy in freefall.

The rouble was collapsing. Institutions were dissolving. The fear in Washington wasn’t that Russia would militarise space. It was that Russian space scientists, suddenly unemployed and underpaid, would sell their expertise to states that would.

The solution was elegant in its pragmatism. In 1993, the Clinton administration invited Russia into what had been the US-led Freedom station project. The programme was renamed the International Space Station. Russia brought its docking technology, its long-duration spaceflight expertise, and critically, its engineers — who now had somewhere to go. The US brought funding, partners, and legitimacy. Neither side was doing the other a favour. Both were solving a problem.

The first ISS module, the Russian-built Zarya, launched in November 1998. Continuous human presence began in November 2000. Twenty-five years later, the station is still inhabited — a remarkable fact that tends to get lost in conversations about its impending retirement.

What the ISS Actually Produced

The ISS is the most expensive object ever built. Estimates vary but converge around $150 billion across all partners over its lifetime. For that investment, the world got: continuous human presence in low-Earth orbit for a quarter century, a platform for over 3,000 scientific experiments, materials science research that isn’t possible in gravity, medical insights applicable on Earth, and the operational experience of running a crewed facility in the most hostile environment humans have ever attempted to inhabit.

It also produced something less quantifiable: a generation of scientists, engineers, and mission controllers from fifteen nations who worked together, solved problems together, and built relationships that persisted long after individual missions ended. The institutional knowledge embedded in the ISS programme is one of the most valuable unacknowledged assets in the space economy.

The station retires by 2030. SpaceX — that vertical integration story again — has been contracted to build the deorbit vehicle, a modified Dragon capsule that will guide the station to a controlled reentry over the Pacific. Congress is pushing for an extension to 2032, nervous about handing low-Earth orbit to China before the commercial successors are ready. The political calculation is the same as 1993: don’t leave a vacuum.

Cold to Commercial

What replaces the ISS is the story of the space economy’s next phase, and it’s a story with a different structure than anything that came before.

Axiom Space is building the first commercial space station, attaching modules to the ISS before the station retires and operating them independently after. Starlab, backed by Voyager Space and Airbus, is developing a single-module station with a capacity of four astronauts. Blue Origin’s Orbital Reef promises a “mixed-use business park” in orbit. NASA has committed to being a customer of these commercial platforms, not their operator — a structural shift as significant as any in the history of the programme.

The pattern is consistent with every infrastructure transition in history. Government builds the first railways, the first power grids, the first internet backbone. Commercial operators take over once the risk is understood and the economics are legible. Space is following the same arc, just compressed — because Starship is compressing everything.

The ISS proved that humans could live and work in orbit continuously. Commercial stations will prove that it can be done profitably. That transition — from proof of concept to commercial operation — is the moment the space economy stops being a government programme and starts being an economy.

What This Means for the Space Economy

The current US-China competition is real. The stakes are real. The risk of miscalculation — a satellite goes dark, a safety zone is disputed, an incident escalates through incompatible legal frameworks — is real.

But the history of the previous cold war in space offers a specific and useful lesson: competition and cooperation are not opposites. They are phases. The competition produces the capability. The capability creates the leverage. The leverage, eventually, creates the conditions for arrangements neither side would have accepted at the outset.

Nobody in 1985 predicted that Russian cosmonauts and American astronauts would be sharing a space station by 2000. The prediction would have seemed absurd. It happened anyway, because the economics and the geopolitics aligned in ways that made cooperation more rational than continued competition.

The weightless cold war will follow a similar arc. Not identical — China is not the Soviet Union, and the commercial actors now in the game have no Cold War precedent. But the underlying logic holds. Bring the marginal cost of access to space toward zero. Build the infrastructure of the frontier. Create the conditions for abundance rather than scarcity competition. And watch what the economics produce.

Five issues in, The View from Space has mapped the economic logic of the space economy from first principles. The price unlock. The company positioned to profit from every layer. The proof that vertical integration works. The geopolitical accelerant. And now the historical precedent that tells us how this resolves.

The space economy isn’t coming. It’s already here, in the $11.4 billion Starlink revenue line, in the SpaceX S-1, in the American Airlines announcement, in the 67 nations who have signed the Artemis Accords, and in the Chinese lunar programme that gives those 67 nations a reason to move faster.

The previous cold war gave us GPS, the internet, and the ISS. The weightless cold war will give us the cislunar economy, orbital infrastructure, and arrangements we haven’t yet imagined.

The ISS was born from the end of one cold war. The space economy will be born from the heat of the next one. History doesn’t repeat. But in space, it rhymes with remarkable precision.

The ISS wasn’t built on trust. What comes next won’t be either. That’s fine. It never needed to be.