No One Knows What To Do With the International Space Station (popsci.com)

An anonymous reader shares a report: In 2024 the clock will run out on the International Space Station. Maybe. That's the arbitrary deadline that Congress imposed back in 2014, at which point they'll have to decide whether or not to keep funding the ISS. And yeah, that's a whole seven years away. But then again...it's only seven years away. The ISS takes up half of NASA's human exploration budget -- half of the pile of money allotted for things like sending humans to Mars or to an asteroid. And if they want to push further into space exploration, NASA can't keep sinking three to four billion dollars a year into the ISS. Not that it's really their decision. Congress -- specifically the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology -- decides how much money NASA will get. And because politicians aren't experts in space travel, they keep holding hearings to discuss what they could possibly do with the ISS in seven years' time. Let private industry take it over? Let it crash and burn into the South Pacific? Let the program keep running? The latest hearing took place last week. These are hard questions, in part because people have very different opinions on what's valuable about NASA, and therefore about whether the ISS is still useful. Maybe you think that NASA should really be about exploration, about pushing the boundaries of what we know and where we can travel. In that case, the ISS might not be your first priority. That's a huge chunk of the budget that goes toward bringing things back and forth to low Earth orbit instead of venturing to other planets.

Comments

Re:But but but!

[rhazz]

I say they stop funding the station and start funding research on a better launch mechanism, like a mass driver or whatever. The main barrier to the development of space is the cost of getting stuff up there. Once we had a launch mechanism with a tiny fraction of the cost-per-launch that we have now, a space station (and everything else) would be far more economical.

Re:Just needs a little nudge.

[mykepredko]

Actually it's not. I asked this question to Chris Hadfield (sorry for the name dropping) about two years ago and the 57 degree inclination of the ISS doesn't preclude a trajectory to any lunar orbital inclination - the trajectory required might be a bit wonky (meaning it will take a very long time to get there) but it is possible.

I suspect the biggest limiting factor will be the increased radiation the ISS (and its occupants) will encounter outside of the Van Allen belts.