The International Space Station
The Most Expensive Thing Humans Have Ever Built Is Also the Most Isolated
Right now, roughly 400 kilometres above your head, six or seven people are living inside a structure the size of a football field that took thirteen countries, five space agencies, and forty-two assembly flights to build — and it will be deliberately crashed into the ocean before 2035.
The Idea
The International Space Station is not primarily a science lab. That's what we tell ourselves, and science does happen there — valuable work on muscle atrophy, fluid dynamics in microgravity, materials behaviour in vacuum. But the ISS is, at its core, a political object. It was conceived in the early 1990s as a way to keep Russian aerospace engineers employed after the Soviet collapse — to give them a paycheck rather than a reason to sell weapons expertise abroad. The science came second. The diplomacy came first. What makes this remarkable is that it worked, and then kept working in ways nobody anticipated. The ISS became the longest continuously inhabited outpost off Earth, with humans living aboard since November 2000. It survived the Columbia disaster, the 2008 financial crisis, and multiple periods of severe geopolitical tension between its partner nations. Even after Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022, ISS cooperation continued — not out of warmth, but because both sides recognised that mutual dependence in orbit is a strange and useful thing. You cannot sanction a docking mechanism. The deeper idea here is that shared infrastructure creates a kind of enforced cooperation that diplomacy alone rarely achieves. The ISS did not make the US and Russia friends. It made them colleagues with a shared plumbing problem 400 kilometres up, which turns out to be more durable.
In the World
In June 2023, a Russian Soyuz capsule docked at the ISS while, on the ground, Russian and American politicians were exchanging the sharpest rhetoric since the Cold War. Inside the station, NASA astronaut Frank Rubio and cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitri Petelin were doing what ISS crews always do — maintaining life support systems, conducting experiments, eating rehydrated food together in a module the width of a school corridor. Rubio ended up staying for 371 days — not by choice, but because the Soyuz capsule originally meant to bring him home was struck by a micrometeorite that caused a coolant leak, making it unsafe for return. The capsule was sent back empty. He waited. A new one came. Throughout this, no mission was scrubbed, no crew was abandoned, no cooperation broke down — despite the fact that back on Earth, his country and the country of his crewmates were locked in a proxy conflict. This is not a heartwarming story about people rising above politics. It is something more interesting: a story about what happens when the logistics of survival override ideology. Rubio needed Russian-built Soyuz technology to get home. His crewmates needed American-built solar arrays to keep the lights on. The ISS works, to the extent it does, because mutual dependency makes defection too costly. It is less a symbol of human unity than a proof of concept for a particular kind of structural cooperation — one where you don't need to agree, or even like each other, to be stuck together.
Why It Matters
There's a temptation to look at the ISS and see a triumph of idealism — nations rising above conflict to reach for the stars together. The more honest reading is more useful: it is a lesson in institutional design. The cooperation didn't happen because people were noble. It happened because the structure made unilateral exit too expensive. That idea travels. Many of the most durable international agreements — trade frameworks, scientific collaborations, shared communications infrastructure — persist not because of goodwill but because the cost of walking away exceeds the cost of staying in. Goodwill is fragile. Mutual dependency is stickier. The ISS is also a lesson in the relationship between cost and commitment. It has cost somewhere in the region of 150 billion in various national budgets — a sum so large it distorts ordinary comprehension. That scale of investment doesn't just reflect a commitment; it creates one. When something costs that much, across that many stakeholders, the momentum to continue becomes almost self-sustaining. The question the ISS quietly poses is not 'can humans cooperate in space?' but 'what kinds of structures make cooperation the path of least resistance?' That question is worth carrying well beyond the orbital sciences.
A Question to Ponder
If the most durable cooperation tends to emerge from shared dependency rather than shared values, what does that suggest about how we should design institutions — or relationships — that we actually need to last?
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