Follow-up by Torsten Kriening, Publisher, SpaceWatch.Global. ISU alumnus (EMBA12).
Berlin, 13 July 2026 – This piece, like the editorial that preceded it, is published open access. No paywall, no registration. If you have information, a perspective, or a correction: [email protected]
On Saturday I published an editorial asking what had happened to the International Space University, and said that I did not have the answers.
Thirty-six hours later my inbox is still filling – like I opened Pandora’s box! Alumni from every continent. Staff. Faculty. Former officers. Governing members. People with dates, with correspondence, with corporate filings, and with questions sharper than the ones I asked. Some wrote on the record. Many asked for anonymity, and they have it, without exception.
Not one of those messages was a rant. What arrived was several dozen professionals doing what ISU trained them to do: bring the documents, cross the disciplines, ask the awkward question politely. Whatever has happened to the institution, that part still works. Thank you for your professionalism.
What follows is not the full account. That runs on Thursday, and I explain below why not sooner. This is what has changed since Saturday, including one thing I got wrong.
A correction
On Saturday I wrote that the people behind ISU Global and the New ISU need to talk to each other.
I have since been told, by people close to the Strasbourg initiative, that no such contact has been attempted. ISU Global has not approached the staff and faculty behind the New ISU proposal about cooperation, and the two efforts are not in dialogue.
I stand by the call. But I should have written it as an appeal rather than an assumption, and I should not have implied that a conversation was under way. It is not.
The word is doing too much work
Most of the confusion I have watched over three days is really an argument about a name, and the confusion is doing a lot of work for people who benefit from it.
There is ISU France: the association registered in Illkirch-Graffenstaden under the Local Law of Associations of Alsace-Moselle, which ran the central campus, and which is governed by its Board of Trustees. There is the Strasbourg campus and the people who worked in it. There is International Space University Organization Inc., a Massachusetts non-profit incorporated in 1987 and now operating as ISU Global. And there is the ISU community – over 6,000 alumni in 110 countries, who are not a legal entity at all, and who are discovering this week that the difference matters.
When one person says ISU has died and another says ISU lives on, they are usually both right, because they are not talking about the same thing. Two websites, two organisations, one name. From here on I will name the entity I mean, every time. I would ask everyone else to do the same.
Two camps, hardening
This is the development that matters, and it is worse than the confusion.
Since Saturday, both sides have written to me about the other. Someone close to ISU Global has expressed concern that the two initiatives may not be complementary or built on the same vision. Someone close to the Strasbourg staff has told me, in considerably stronger terms, that they do not believe cooperation with ISU Global is possible or desirable.
I am not going to reproduce either characterisation, because neither is evidence and both are the kind of thing that hardens into permanence once it is printed. But the fact of the split is itself the news, and the ISU community should hear it plainly: six days after the liquidation, the two groups claiming ISU’s future are not talking, and are briefing against each other.
An institution that spent four decades teaching international, intercultural and interdisciplinary cooperation to thousands of people has fractured into two groups that will not cooperate. That should stop. It should stop this week, and it should stop before either side hires a lawyer over the name.
ISU Global begins to answer
Overnight, the first substantive public account from inside ISU Global appeared – not as an official statement, but as a personal note from Emeline Paat-Dahlstrom, a long-standing volunteer with the initiative. It deserves to be read, and it deserves to be reported, because it answers questions I put publicly on Saturday.
She addresses the registration of the isu.global domain on 9 May, two months before the liquidation, which I flagged as one of the harder questions on the timeline. Her explanation is that the registration coincided with the development of a shortened summer programme and the communications platform intended to support it. She also states that ISU Global was unable to announce its existence before the 7 July ruling because of the legal constraints of the French court proceedings, and that the website going live afterwards was not intended as a challenge to anyone.
That is an answer. I asked the question; she has given one; readers can weigh it.
She also discloses something that had not been reported. From May, a volunteer team of faculty spent roughly six weeks developing a shortened SSP for delivery this August, in collaboration with the City of Strasbourg, designed specifically to serve the students already registered for SSP26. It did not proceed, because it depended on securing the City as host site and that approval did not come.
One detail in her account should stop everyone. The contact details of the registered SSP26 participants sit only with the French administrator handling the insolvency. The people most directly harmed by this collapse cannot, at present, be reached by those trying to help them.
In a follow-up comment she says ISU Global is actively working on the situation of current MSS and SSP students, declines to announce anything not yet confirmed, and asks affected students to register their inquiry through the ISU Global website. Given that nobody else can currently reach them, that is worth acting on: if you are an MSS26 or SSP26 student, register there, and write to us as well.
She also rejects, directly, the suggestion that this amounts to an American takeover. She holds three citizenships, lives in New Zealand, and says she thinks of herself as representing the Asia-Pacific as much as anywhere. It is a fair point and it deserves to be heard. The entity is registered in Massachusetts; that is a fact of corporate law, not a statement of nationality. Whether the ISU community accepts the argument is a separate matter, but nobody should pretend the argument was not made.
Ms Paat-Dahlstrom is clear that her involvement began in May and that she has no personal knowledge of the financial decisions that led to insolvency. I take her at her word on both points, and I note that she volunteered an explanation nobody had compelled her to give. That is more than anyone else connected to this story has done so far.
It also means the answer to “did anyone try?” is beginning to look like yes – on more than one front, by more than one group, and mostly too late.
The people in the water
MSS26 students were told on 8 July that their programme cannot continue. Their problem is administrative and urgent: whether the work already completed can be credited, and by whom. Work is under way. It is not solved.
SSP26 participants and their sponsors paid. Students paid deposits and personal contributions; employers, scholarship funds and sponsoring organisations paid on their behalf, for a programme that will not happen. In a judicial liquidation that money does not come back because someone asks nicely. It becomes a claim against the estate, ranked behind other creditors, settled at the liquidator’s pace and at whatever fraction the estate can carry. Some of those affected are early-career professionals from countries where an SSP place represents a serious national or personal investment.
If the ISU community wants something concrete to organise around this week, it is those deposits. The people affected have names. Everything else on my desk is about the past. That one is still live.
What I have asked, and who has answered
On Saturday I said the community deserved a transparent accounting. So I have asked for one.
Over the weekend I put detailed written questions to Christian Sallaberger, Chair of the ISU Board of Trustees, and to Dr John Wensveen, President until June. Both have until 18:00 CEST on Wednesday to reply.
Dr Wensveen has responded. He declined to answer, citing an ongoing legal process, and referred SpaceWatch.Global to the Chair of the Board of Trustees. He also said it appeared to him that we had been given a lot of incorrect information. I have invited him to identify any specific factual error so that it can be corrected before publication, and that invitation stands until Wednesday.
Mr Sallaberger has not yet responded.
I have also been told, by more than one person, that serious attempts were made this spring to rescue the European campus – including approaches that have never been reported. I am checking those accounts and will set them out on Thursday. The question every alumnus is asking is whether anyone tried. The answer appears to be that some people did.
Why Thursday
The reporting rests on documents: correspondence circulated to ISU’s governing membership, successive versions of the association’s by-laws, the letter the elected staff representatives sent to the Board of Trustees in September 2025, and filings held in public registries – Massachusetts, the USPTO, WIPO, and the French accounts, which are published by law. Most of it is material any reader could obtain. Very little depends on anyone’s word.
I could publish it this morning. I am not going to. The question at the centre of this story is whether decisions of great consequence were taken in a hurry, without proper process, and without letting the people affected be heard. It would be a strange way to make that case.
So: Thursday, with their answers, or with the fact that they did not answer.
One further note, in the interests of transparency. SpaceWatch.Global has declined all offers of professional engagement from parties to this story, and will continue to do so for as long as we are reporting on it.
To everyone who has written since Saturday – thank you. The door is open.
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Disclosure: SpaceWatch.Global hosted Dr John Wensveen for a Space Café interview on 31 March 2026.
