Editorial by Torsten Kriening, Publisher, SpaceWatch.Global
Berlin, 11 July 2026 – This editorial is published open access – no paywall, no registration. The ISU community and the wider space sector deserve to follow this story without barriers. If you have information, a perspective, or a correction, reach out: [email protected]
For nearly four decades, the International Space University built its identity on three I’s: international, intercultural, interdisciplinary. They described something real. Thousands of graduates – myself included – can attest to that.
But the three I’s that brought ISU down are different ones: insolvent, insular, irresponsible.
That is a hard sentence to write as an EMBA12 alumnus who signed the community petition, who offered ISU a public platform when its president asked for help, and who has spent four months watching an institution that shaped my career disintegrate while those responsible narrated the collapse in the language of strategic vision.
On 7 July 2026, the Commercial Court of Strasbourg ordered the judicial liquidation of ISU France. No continuation. No reprieve. The central campus – home to the Master of Space Studies, the summer programmes, the incubator, the library under the flags of the world – ceases to exist. MSS26 students have been told their degrees cannot continue. Close to two dozen staff face unemployment.
The world’s first space university, founded in 1987, over 6,000 alumni in 110 countries – liquidated.
127 Days
The chronology of ISU’s final months tells its own story.
3 March 2026. President Dr. John Wensveen sends a fundraising appeal to the global ISU community. He asks for €1.5 million in scholarship funding, pledges €1,000 of his own money, and invites 1,500 alumni to match. The letter frames the crisis as “circumstances outside of our control” – CNES has pulled funding, ESA’s support is uncertain.
31 March 2026. Wensveen joins SpaceWatch.Global for a Space Café webinar. On camera, he describes the situation as “the most critical stage in our entire almost four decades of being alive.” He reports a spending freeze, reveals ISU will skip the Space Symposium, and concedes that worst-case scenarios – including closure of the Strasbourg campus – are formally under review. But he also talks about Moonshot 2030, global expansion, centres on every continent.
9 May 2026. The domain isu.global is registered. The public WHOIS record shows a registrant contact in Reykjavik, Iceland – which, as it turns out, is simply a standard domain privacy proxy service. The actual registrant is masked. But the date is not.
12 June 2026. Wensveen publishes a farewell letter titled “End of Mission.” ISU is already in the French safeguard process. The letter thanks colleagues abstractly, references “resistance to change,” and states that “the mission is larger than any one campus.” It does not mention the students whose degrees are in limbo, the staff losing their jobs, or donors who may have contributed against the March appeal. He departs for a position in Florida.
7 July 2026. The court orders liquidation.
8 July 2026. The ISU Global website goes live with a polished presentation of a “Global Campus Initiative.” Bob Richards, one of ISU’s three original founders, confirms to journalist Douglas Messier that it is published by the original Massachusetts non-profit entity from 1987. Around 30 alumni, faculty, and staff are reportedly involved. Richards describes the Strasbourg era as “sunsetting.”
11 July 2026. Strasbourg-based staff, led by Associate Professor Bertrand Goldman, publish a competing proposal for a “New ISU” cooperative. Goldman writes publicly of “opaque and reckless managerial and financial decisions out of touch with the funding reality, and lack of oversight.”
127 days from the fundraising appeal to the liquidation order. The questions that arise from this timeline are straightforward, and they deserve answers.
- When did the leadership conclude that ISU France could not be saved?
- Was the March fundraising appeal made in good faith, or was a parallel path already being prepared?
- Who authorised the registration of isu.global on 9 May, and with what mandate?
- Were donors informed that a successor entity was in development while they were being asked for money?
- And the most basic question: what happened to any funds raised against the March campaign – are they now part of the liquidation estate?
I do not have the answers. But the community that was asked to give deserves them.
Two Flags, One Broken Mast
Within hours of the liquidation, two competing initiatives claimed the ISU legacy.
ISU Global draws authority from ISU’s original 1987 Massachusetts incorporation and its founders. It envisions a network of regional hubs worldwide – Phase 2 of the original founding vision. The website is forward-looking and professionally built. It includes a student support registry. It does not, as of today, provide clarity on governance, funding, accreditation, or the immediate situation of current students and staff.
The New ISU, proposed by Strasbourg staff and alumni, takes the opposite approach: a cooperative model with shared governance, a focus on preserving the campus, a partnership with the University of Strasbourg, and detailed plans for restructured programmes including a 40th anniversary celebration in April 2027. It names the institutional failures directly and centres the people who were left behind – staff, students, volunteer faculty.
Senior figures in the ISU community have told me, with considerable frustration, that the ISU Global launch came across as tone-deaf – appearing within hours of a ruling that left students stranded and staff jobless, without initially addressing those casualties. The isu.global domain registration two months before the ruling only deepens that impression.
Others note that the staff proposal, while substantive, faces the challenge of building a new entity from scratch in a country where the previous one just failed.
Keith Cowing noted on LinkedIn that the information available was “incomplete and confusing.” Two ISU websites, two organisations, neither providing the unified clarity students, alumni, and the sector need. He is right.
What the Community Is Saying
The petition at saveisu-campaign-2026.web.app has gathered over 1,058 signatures and 281 written testimonials in days. It was initiated by staff representatives and alumni. The first batch was submitted to the court-appointed administrator on 1 July.
The testimonials are not sentimental. They describe career transformations, lifelong friendships, an understanding of space as something no single discipline or nation can own. “There is a time before ISU, and a time after ISU” – that sentence appears, in various forms, across dozens of entries.
I signed it. What I wrote is true: ISU helped me build what became SpaceWatch.Global. The friendships from EMBA12 have lasted over a decade. ISU is one of the few places where the space community is genuinely formed as one.
But signatures do not pay salaries, secure accreditation, or answer the hard questions about what went wrong.
What Needs to Happen
The people behind ISU Global and the New ISU need to talk to each other – not to merge, but to establish whether cooperation is possible before this fractures permanently. An institution that taught international cooperation to thousands should be able to practise it in its own crisis.
The immediate human casualties must come first. MSS26 students need a pathway to finish their degrees. SSP participants need clarity on refunds. Staff need to know whether they have a future. Any plan that leads with vision and treats these people as an afterthought has its priorities wrong.
And the community – the alumni, the agencies, the sector – deserves a transparent accounting of what happened. Not Wensveen’s passive-voice farewell. Not LinkedIn positioning. A proper review of the financial decisions and governance failures that turned a known structural vulnerability into a terminal collapse in under five months.
An Open Call
This editorial is open because the story is not finished and because I do not have all the facts. Nobody does, yet.
- If you were involved in the financial decisions at ISU in the past two years – talk to us.
- If you know what happened to the funds raised after the March appeal – talk to us.
- If you are an MSS26 student or SSP participant dealing with the fallout – talk to us.
- If you are at CNES, ESA, or Eurométropole and can shed light on the funding decisions – talk to us.
- If you are part of ISU Global or the New ISU initiative and want to make your case – our platform is open.
The founding three I’s described something worth preserving. The failure’s three I’s – insolvent, insular, irresponsible – describe what destroyed it.
The community has shown a third set: invested, impatient, insistent. Over a thousand people made clear in under a week that they will not let this mission disappear.
That energy is ISU’s most valuable surviving asset – the one thing no court can liquidate. But energy without structure is noise, and structure without honesty is the next failure waiting to happen.
SpaceWatch.Global will stay on this story.
