As the International Space Station's deorbitation shifts from distant possibility to near-term reality, the European Space Agency and Axiom Space have signed a Memorandum of Understanding in Paris, signaling that the age of guaranteed institutional access to low Earth orbit is ending and a new era of negotiated, commercial participation is beginning. Europe, which built its scientific and human spaceflight identity in part through decades of ISS partnership, now faces the deeper question every generation of explorers must eventually answer: how do you preserve continuity when the platform bene