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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.
We should take money away from killing people and fully fund both the ISS and space exploration.
Because of the idiotic failure, the Space Shuttle, the ISS was put into orbit way too low to do real science. Usually it's less than 400 km, and rarely goes above 410 km. For comparison, the radius of the earth is over 6000 km. That is if the earth was 10% bigger, the ISS would be half as deep underground as it currently is above.
If they boosted it up from Low Earth Orbit to Medium Earth orbit (2,000 km -> 35,000 km) it would be far more useful.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
" The main barrier to the development of space is the cost of getting stuff up there."
No, the main barrier is that it makes no sense. What's to "develop" in a deadly, empty vacuum with a few dry rocks strewn around light minutes apart?