Let’s Bring the Astronauts Home

This article strikes me as being incredibly reductionist as to what the ISS has to teach us. Sure, pure science is not being greatly advanced by the ISS - as noted in the article, robotic satellites have proven to be a better solution for that. But we have learned massive amounts about the engineering needed for:

a) in orbit construction of large structures.

b) What things don't scale when building on a larger scale? What sort of joints work when large structures can generate large moments of torque due to rotation. How do we deal with leaks etc, which become more likely the bigger the structure. What are

c) keeping humans alive in space for months at a time (necessary if we are ever to visit other planets)

d) building high-capacity equipment for space - how do you deal with solar heating on something as large as the ISS? What's the effect of all of that moving charge generated by those massive solar panels, when there is absolutely no way to ground the system?

These are the sorts of things that can only be figured out by doing - as most of us on HN know, engineering is not a hard science - we don't necessarily know in advance which things are important and which things can be neglected - who would have thought that low temperatures could cause a shuttle to explode, or that falling insulation foam could cause one to disintegrate on re-entry? We learn these things by doing and discovering what works and what doesn't. The ISS is by far the biggest piece of hardware we have ever assembled in space, and the lessons we have learnt in building it are well-worth the dollars spent.

Of course, we musn't forget that the damned thing would have cost an awful lot less if the launch prices that we have available today, thanks to SpaceX and friends, had existed 20 years ago. If we must criticize the ISS, the thing to criticize is the fact that we used the Shuttle to build it, and the Shuttle was a really bad solution to the problem of launching things into space. But then, we didn't know the Shuttle was a bad idea until we tried it - prior to trying it looked really good on paper!