Orbital Custodians
The $150 Billion Janitorial Service
8,994 days. $150 billion. The most expensive cleaning crew in history orbits Earth at 17,000 mph, performing what NASA calls “standard lab maintenance tasks” with religious devotion. The vacuum of space doesn’t interrupt the vacuum cleaner.
We’ve built a $150 billion janitorial closet in orbit and called it progress.
Place humans in the most hostile environment imaginable, and they immediately start cleaning. This pattern holds across languages, nationalities, crew rotations. The humans clean. They scrub ducts. They swap filters. They test water loops. Orbital velocity: 17,000 mph. Temperature outside: -150°C to 150°C. Primary activity inside: housekeeping.
Here’s what nobody’s saying: maintenance isn’t a means to an end. It’s the end itself. We’re not maintaining the ISS to enable science. We’re doing science to justify maintaining the ISS. The circle completes itself every 73 days when the air filters need changing again.
The vocabulary of persistence
The Expedition 72 crew’s daily logs for early 2025 read like custodial work orders. Life-science experiments, yes. But also cleaning ducts, replacing filters, unscrewing panels, preparing tools for spacewalks. The verbs are identical to terrestrial maintenance: clean, replace, swap, test, check, inventory.
On January 23, 2025, the log notes: “housecleaning duties and lab maintenance” alongside research work. The commander cleaned ducts, fans, and air sensors inside the Harmony module’s port-side crew quarters. “Housecleaning duties.” As if someone were documenting janitor hours in an office building, not describing human behavior 400 kilometers above Earth. Which they are.
Perhaps this is what space travel actually looks like. Not Star Trek exploration, but preventive maintenance schedules in microgravity. The Enterprise crew never cleaned the matter/antimatter injectors. Real astronauts scrub duct surfaces so air quality sensors can detect when those same ducts need scrubbing again. The future is here. It requires filter changes every 73 days.
Three months earlier, on November 25, 2024, the station executed a debris-avoidance maneuver. The docked Russian Progress MS-89 fired its engines for three-and-a-half minutes. Cost per orbital boost: undisclosed. Reason: a satellite fragment threatened collision. The station shifted orbit. The logs betray this with the same flat affect as duct-cleaning: task completed, operation nominal.
What the logs record
The ISS is aging. A 2024 review noted the station is “showing its age.” Partners plan decommissioning around 2030. Until then, the maintenance schedule remains unchanging.
January 24, 2025: Spacesuit maintenance. The crew charged lithium-ion batteries in the Extravehicular Mobility Units, filtered and cleaned cooling water loops, checked glove heaters, helmet lights, cameras. The water loops prevent heat stroke. The glove heaters prevent frostbite. The maintenance prevents catastrophic equipment failure.
The crew performs this with the same routine affect as changing oil in a car, except the car is a $12 million suit and you’re changing the oil in vacuum where a leak means death in ninety seconds. Still: routine. The logs say so.
The commander also cleaned duct surfaces, fan grilles, air quality sensors. Another crew member, same day, same module, filmed a water evaporation demonstration for students. Physics demonstration. Tool inventory. Duct scrubbing. The log notes them in sequence, separated by commas, equal in bureaucratic weight.
January 16, 2025: During a spacewalk, two crew members replaced a rate gyro assembly, patched telescope damage, replaced a docking reflector. The spacewalk lasted hours. Much of that time: accessing panels, routing safety tethers, positioning tools, documenting procedures. The repair itself: minutes.
Ten hours of prep for twenty minutes of hardware swap. Yet the logs betray this without comment, as if it were obvious that changing a device in orbit should require thirty times the overhead of the repair itself. Perhaps this is simply what maintenance costs at 17,000 mph.
A November 15, 2024 blog entry summarizes a week: “advanced life-support, robotics and repair-technology studies” alongside “keeping up standard lab maintenance tasks.”
The phrase repeats. “Standard lab maintenance tasks.”
Across years. Across crew rotations. Across international partners.
It appears in logs until it becomes ambient. Not notable. Just there. Like breathing. Which, incidentally, also requires maintenance. The carbon dioxide scrubbers need servicing every 90 days or breathing stops being an option.
The Performance of Normalcy
NASA has perfected the art of domesticating the extraordinary. Their bureaucratic prose transforms orbital housekeeping into something as mundane as office maintenance. This isn’t just documentation. It’s mythology construction. By treating the absurd as routine, NASA performs a kind of reality laundering: the more normal it appears, the less we question the price tag.
When a spacewalk requires hours of preparation for a twenty-minute repair, the logs don’t acknowledge the absurdity. Perhaps they can’t. Acknowledging it would require answering why we’re doing this at all, and that question leads uncomfortable places.
The documentation treats this as routine because treating it as routine is the only way to continue treating it as routine. Break the spell and someone might ask what we’re paying for. Better to keep the logs flat. The affect neutral. The maintenance nominal.
Billionaires fund Mars architecture. Astronauts in their spacecraft clean air ducts. Both activities happen simultaneously. One gets headlines. The other gets logged.
Cooperation through cleaning protocols
The ISS is a partnership of NASA, Roscosmos, ESA, JAXA, and the Canadian Space Agency. On Earth, these agencies represent nations with diverging geopolitical interests. In orbit, they share a maintenance manual.
The December 17, 2024 log notes that Expedition 72 prepared for robotics work, serviced exercise equipment, reconfigured a science airlock. Different nations manufactured these systems. Different contractors. Competing space agencies.
Yet the maintenance procedures converge.
Same torque specifications. Same replacement schedules. Same inventory systems.
Russian spacecraft dock. Deliver supplies. Fire thrusters for orbital boosts. American commercial vehicles bring cargo. SpaceX. Northrop Grumman. European modules host experiments. Japanese equipment runs continuously.
The maintenance pidgin enabling this: “torque to spec.” “Filter swap complete.” “Nominal operation.” “Standard lab maintenance.” Four space agencies. Five nations. Seventeen languages. One vocabulary: the language of keeping things clean and functional.
In crew training, astronauts and cosmonauts who struggle with conversational Russian or English learn a pidgin of maintenance. They may not discuss politics fluently. But they can coordinate filter replacements, duct cleaning, and torque-wrench procedures with precision. This maintenance pidgin may be the most successful international technical language protocol ever developed.
Perhaps this is the future of diplomacy: lock the negotiators in a spacecraft with a leaking air filter and a maintenance manual. Agreement by morning or nobody’s breathing by afternoon.
Americans and Russians, whose governments cannot agree on diplomatic protocols, agree on bolt torque specifications for ISS module connections. The ISS maintenance manual is a treaty written in millimeters, newton-meters, and cleaning schedules.
The research requires the repetition
The ISS National Lab’s December 2024 newsletter noted that nearly 50 payloads returned to Earth on the CRS-31 mission. Research advancing cancer detection, neurodegenerative treatments, respiratory therapies. The research depends on the maintenance. Air filters, water recyclers, thermal radiators, carbon dioxide scrubbers functioning without interruption.
The station cannot self-repair. It requires humans. And what humans do, primarily, is maintain.
The logs document this without interpretation. Cancer research happens. Ducts get cleaned. Both appear in the same daily summary, separated by a semicolon.
The anthropology of continuous presence
“Continuous occupation.”
NASA repeats it: continuous occupation since November 2, 2000. The continuity gets emphasized. Documented. Protected.
Debris field threatens? Boost orbit to maintain occupation. Module ages out? Retrofit it. Supplies run low? Emergency resupply.
The logs don’t record why continuity matters. They can’t. Asking why would break the spell. Better to keep changing filters than to ask why the filters must be changed so the humans can remain so the continuity can persist so the filters can be changed.
The station could operate robotically. Many satellites do. But ISS operations require unbroken human presence with unusual emphasis.
What’s remarkable isn’t the engineering. The engineering works. What’s remarkable is that we need the continuity to continue. Not for any specific purpose beyond itself. The occupation continues because the occupation must continue. Humans maintain sacred flames. Guard tombs. Staff embassies in hostile territory. The ISS is all of these: a $150 billion sacred flame where someone must clean the ducts.
Strange behaviors in vacuum
The absurdity compounds in layers. Humans clean water pipes, in orbit, inside a suit that costs approximately $12 million. The suit exists to protect them from vacuum so they can perform maintenance outside the station. The station itself requires maintenance to remain habitable. The logs document this recursion with the same bureaucratic affect as terrestrial maintenance logs.
We’ve created the most expensive Russian nesting doll in history, and at the center is a filter that needs changing.
Place a human in the most expensive artificial environment ever constructed, and within hours they will begin cleaning it. This reveals something fundamental about human psychology, though whether it’s comforting or horrifying depends on your disposition. We’re not explorers. We’re custodians.
The ISS culture has naturalized this recursion. The blogs describe spacesuit water-loop cleaning with the same bureaucratic affect as changing HVAC filters in an office building. The environment is different. Orbital mechanics, radiation exposure, thermal extremes. The vocabulary is identical. Clean, filter, test, verify, document.
Some behaviors translated directly from Earth: cleaning. Other behaviors emerged from orbital culture: the maintenance logs themselves. Every action gets documented, time-stamped, recorded. January 23: cleaned ducts. January 24: tested suit. January 16: replaced gyro. The accumulation of these entries over 24 years forms a record of what humans do when placed in an artificial environment and asked to remain indefinitely.
Answer: they maintain.
What’s remarkable isn’t that we maintain. Most animals maintain shelter. What’s remarkable is that we document the maintenance with such obsessive precision, then publish the documentation daily, as if the logs themselves prove something beyond the capability to follow checklists in vacuum.
Perhaps the documentation is the point. Proof that we were here, we persisted, we kept the filters changed. Continuous occupation requires continuous documentation. The logs don’t just record maintenance. They perform legitimacy.
The aging infrastructure
As hardware ages, maintenance requirements increase. As retirement approaches, investment in new hardware decreases. The result: more time spent maintaining aging systems using aging tools to preserve aging modules.
Some modules date from the 1990s. They are now older than some of the astronauts inhabiting them. Systems designed for 15-year operational lifespans are now in their third decade. The debris field itself is increasing. Defunct satellites, spent rocket stages, collision fragments.
By 2030, assuming the station makes it that long, we’ll have spent $150 billion to prove humans can live in orbit if they spend most of their time maintaining the systems that allow them to live in orbit. This will be either humanity’s greatest achievement or its most expensive circular reasoning.
The Maintenance Gospel
Read enough ISS blogs and you can hear the congregation responding:
The filters were changed.
Thanks be to NASA.
The ducts were cleaned.
And it was nominal.
The spacewalk completed without incident.
Blessed be the torque specifications.
The continuity continues.
Now and forever, or at least until 2030, amen.
We’ve built the most expensive religion in history, and its only sacrament is filter replacement.
This isn’t metaphor. It’s operational reality performing as religious observance. Every crew rotation learns the liturgy. Every mission log adds another verse. The repetition creates ritual that makes the extraordinary feel inevitable.
The phrase “standard lab maintenance tasks” appears with liturgical regularity across years and crew rotations. It functions as catechism. New crew members arrive already knowing the responses. The maintenance was performed. It was nominal. All glory to the cleaning schedule.
Like all religious texts, the maintenance logs serve multiple functions. Practical documentation. Cultural transmission. Myth-making. They tell a story about human capability that transcends the actual tasks being performed.
The gospel of maintenance suggests that if humans can maintain a space station continuously for 8,994 days, they can maintain anything. Forever. Regardless of cost or purpose.
This gospel has converts. Space agencies point to ISS maintenance as proof of readiness for Mars missions. The faithful see orbital housekeeping as preparation for interplanetary colonization. The skeptics see a $150 billion maintenance contract masquerading as research platform, which will be replaced by a $300 billion Mars maintenance contract masquerading as colony.
The pattern holds either way. Humans will clean. They will document the cleaning. They will call this exploration.
What remains unspoken
Some frame ISS maintenance as preparation for deep-space missions. Others frame maintenance as an end in itself. The station exists, therefore it must be maintained.
What no one asks: why can’t we admit we’re spending $150 billion because stopping would mean admitting we shouldn’t have started? What does our need for narrative justification reveal about how we process sunk costs that orbit at 17,000 mph?
The astronauts rarely comment on why they clean. The logs document that they do clean, with metronomic regularity, but not why the cleaning matters beyond immediate function. The filter is dirty. Therefore it gets changed. The chain of reasoning ends there.
Perhaps that’s the only chain of reasoning that works. Push further and you’re asking why the humans are there at all. Why we’ve spent $150 billion to prove humans can clean ducts in orbit when we already knew humans can clean ducts anywhere you put them.
The logs betray what happens, not what it means. Engineers see technical validation. Politicians see cooperation. Futurists see Mars preparation. Anthropologists see strange primate behavior in artificial environment.
What no one contests: the filters get changed, the ducts get cleaned, the water loops get tested, the inventory gets updated. The maintenance continues, documented in flat bureaucratic prose, day after day, orbit after orbit.
The ISS may be the first human habitat where maintenance logs get publicly archived daily. It creates an anthropological record of what humans do when placed in orbit and asked to stay.
They clean. They repair. They document.
Eventually, maintenance costs will exceed research value. The logs won’t document that transition. They never document the end, only the daily continuation.
This pattern already operates in most organizations. The maintenance becomes the mission. The cleaning becomes the calling. The procedures become the purpose. Soon, entire industries will exist primarily to maintain themselves, original purposes long forgotten.
The difference is that most organizations don’t publish their maintenance logs daily. The ISS does. And what the logs reveal, day after orbital day, is that humans placed in the most expensive artificial environment ever constructed will immediately start cleaning it, then document the cleaning with religious devotion, then call this science.
The vacuum of space doesn’t interrupt the vacuum cleaner. It never has. It never will. The filters get changed. The continuity continues. And it was nominal.
Research Notes: The Unglamorous Reality of Space Station Maintenance
A mundane detail caught my attention: NASA’s daily blog mentioned Commander Suni Williams spending part of her day cleaning ducts, fans, and air sensors in the Harmony module. Not repairing critical systems after a dramatic failure. Not conducting groundbreaking experiments. Just housecleaning. In space.