Other longtime ISS partners are already planning their next steps. NASA has only technically certified the station’s hardware until 2028 and has awarded more than $400 million to fund private replacements. It’s not clear when the ISS will go offline, but it will happen. Russia and India are planning to launch their own space stations to low-Earth orbit, too, and China’s Tiangong station, which is currently under construction, already has astronauts living aboard. NASA is also building a space station called Gateway near the moon a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket carrying the living quarters for the station is scheduled to launch in 2024.
Private companies currently backed by NASA, including Lockheed Martin and Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin, could launch as many as four space stations into Earth’s orbit over the next decade. “We want to transition lower-Earth orbit over to commercial companies so that the government and NASA can go use resources to do harder things in deep space.” “Commercial companies have the capability now to do this, and so we don’t want to compete with that,” Robyn Gatens, the director of the ISS, told Recode. That means countries won’t just be using these new stations to strengthen their own national space programs, but as lucrative business ventures, too. At that point, anyone hoping to work in space will have to choose among several different outposts. When these stations are ready, NASA will guide the ISS into the atmosphere, where it will burn up and disintegrate. As part of that transition, the space agency wants to rent out facilities for its astronauts on new space stations run by private companies. NASA is scaling back its presence in low-Earth orbit as the government focuses on sending humans back to the moon and, eventually, to Mars. While these new stations will make it easier for more humans to visit space, they’re also bound to create new political and economic tensions. But after two decades in orbit, the ISS will shut down, and a crop of several new space stations will take its place. The International Space Station brings together astronauts from around the world to collaborate on cutting-edge research, and some have called it humanity’s greatest achievement.
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