If you step outside into the cool Central Texas night this week, remember to look up. Sometime between your evening coffee and settling in for the night, a single, brilliant star will glide silently across the celestial tapestry. It won’t twinkle. It won’t blink. It will move with a purpose and a speed that feels utterly alien, a steady, determined arc of light against the infinite black.
What you’re seeing is not a star, and it’s not a plane. It’s a house. A laboratory. A lifeboat. It’s the International Space Station, and for a few precious minutes on Tuesday and Wednesday evening, you can witness this miracle of human ingenuity with your own eyes. On Wednesday night, it will pass directly overhead, a journey from horizon to horizon that takes a mere six minutes. Six minutes to cross our entire field of view, because it’s hurtling along at a staggering 17,500 miles per hour.
I often think about what that dot of light truly represents. For 25 years—a quarter of a century—humanity has not been confined to Earth. Since November of 2000, there has always been someone living up there, in that fragile, magnificent outpost. It’s one of the most profound and quietly triumphant achievements in our history, a continuous streak of presence in the void. We did more than just visit space; we learned to live there.
And what a learning curve it has been. The ISS became our crucible for mastering a new environment. How do you drink water without gravity? How do you exercise so your bones don't turn to dust? The human body, it turns out, is a finely tuned terrestrial machine, and spaceflight throws a wrench in the works. We have to contend with things like microgravity-induced fluid shifts—in simpler terms, your entire biology has to relearn the rules without gravity as a constant guide, affecting everything from your eyes to your cardiovascular system. Research aboard the station is cracking these codes, not just for the sake of exploration, but for life back here on Earth.
But the ISS was never just about survival. It was about building a future. It’s where we grew the first chili peppers in space, a small step for botany that represented a giant leap toward self-sufficiency on multi-year missions to Mars. It’s where we learned to 3D print tools and parts on demand, even successfully printing with metal in 2024, freeing future explorers from the tyranny of Earth-based supply lines. Can you imagine the freedom? A critical part breaks millions of miles from home, and you just… print a new one. This is the kind of breakthrough that reminds me why I got into this field in the first place.
Don't Mourn the Station, Celebrate the Launchpad
The End of an Era is the Beginning of Everything Else
So when you see headlines like "NASA Will Crash The International Space Station in 2030," it’s easy to feel a sense of loss. The language is so final, so brutal. It suggests an ending, a failure. When I first read about the 2030 deorbit plan, I honestly felt a pang of real sadness. This shining beacon of international cooperation, this home to more than 4,000 experiments and countless discoveries, is scheduled to be driven into a remote patch of the Pacific Ocean.
But to see this as just an ending is to miss the entire point. It’s to miss the single greatest lesson the ISS has taught us.
The ISS was never meant to be the final destination. It was the school. It was humanity’s freshman dorm in the cosmos, the place we went to learn the basics before we could truly move out on our own. And now, we’re about to graduate. The plan isn’t to abandon low-Earth orbit; it’s to hand the keys over to a new generation. NASA is actively funding the development of privately owned, commercially operated space stations. Think about that for a second. We’ve reached a point where building a habitat in orbit is no longer solely the domain of superpower governments, but a viable commercial enterprise.
This isn’t the end of an embassy; it’s the graduation of the first class. This is like ARPANET, the government’s closed computer network, evolving into the open, commercial, world-changing internet we use every day. By turning low-Earth orbit over to commercial partners, NASA is freeing itself up to do what it does best: push the next frontier. The research from the ISS is already being baked into the Artemis missions to the Moon, ensuring the Orion spacecraft can protect its crew from radiation and navigate deep space. We are taking the lessons learned 250 miles up and applying them hundreds of thousands of miles away, and eventually, millions of miles away on the path to Mars.
Of course, with this incredible leap comes a profound responsibility. As we transition from a single, collaborative station to a multi-platform orbital ecosystem, we must ensure that the spirit of peaceful, scientific cooperation that defined the ISS continues to guide us. The future of humanity in space depends on it.
So, this week, go outside. Find a clear view of the northwestern horizon. At 7:55 PM on Wednesday, look for that impossibly bright, fast-moving dot. Don’t just see it as a satellite. See it for what it is. See the 25 years of continuous human life packed into that speck of light. See the chili peppers and the 3D printers and the solutions to bone density loss. And that dot, that incredible, impossible dot, is the proof—it’s the legacy of a quarter-century of learning how to live off-world and it’s the launchpad for a future where low-Earth orbit becomes a bustling hub of commerce and science and human potential.
You’re not just seeing the International Space Station. You’re witnessing the precise moment a species gets ready to leave the nest.
The Graduation Ceremony
The ISS was never the house we were meant to live in forever. It was the blueprint. It was the painstaking, expensive, and brilliant first draft that taught us how to build. We are not losing a home in 2030. We are launching a civilization.
Reference article source：
- Two Chances to See the International Space Station
- International Space Station: Launching NASA and Humanity into Deep Space
- NASA Will Crash The International Space Station in 2030. Here's What Comes Next.