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Having a space station is not important. Having the infrastructure to build and maintain a space station is important.

When the US stopped sending people to the moon it stopped to be capable of sending people past LEO. A space station at least ensures that we can still send people to space.

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But we (USA) can't still send people to space. We voluntarily gave up that infrastructure years ago and have no clear, funded plan to restore it.

For manned spaceflight, NASA's top priority should be basic research into breakthrough propulsion technologies. It's pretty clear that we'll never be able to safely send a large number of people anywhere worthwhile using chemical rockets.

We do have a funded plan to restore it. SpaceX and Boeing have contracts to ferry people to the ISS, starting in a year or so. Both of them have constructed serious amounts of hardware, both the capsules and the pads/towers required to launch them.

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