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Comment by rtkwe | Hacker News Reader

I believe it when there's a replacement launched, it's been about to be decommissioned for the last 2 decades with the same idea that there will be a commercial station to replace it and it always gets pushed back because space is still too damn expensive for anyone other than a government to put people up there. Maybe NASA's hand will be forced by the slow degradation of the structure from heat cycling causing leaks and cracks we're starting to see, but I think that's more likely to wind up with a break in this continuous habitation streak than with a proper replacement.

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The entire ISS could be launched in 3, maybe 4 SpaceX Starship launches assuming Elon is correct about his claims for the payload.

To put in in perspective, the ISS required 36 Space Shuttle launches at a cost of $1.5B per launch ($54B). For that cost, assuming a pessimistic cost for Starship of $10M per launch (5,400/4 launches), you could launch 1,350 International Space Stations for the same price as the ISS cost to launch flying on the shuttle. To me it sounds not only realistic that we would launch a replacement but surpass it by 100x or 1000x.

We have come a long way from the late 90s and early 2000s when ISS was built. If NASA was properly funded I'm sure it would also be able to build a competing station cheaper/easier as well. ISS and NASA paved the way for SpaceX. So them being to do it cheaper isn't as impressive as it was bound to happen.

That would also be the first time Elon is correct about his claims, then.

His claims about falcon 9 mostly line up with reality.

Launching isn't the only thing you need to do to build a replacement, there's building it twice: once on Earth and again in space. The ISS was assembled largely by hand by astronauts working out of the Space Shuttle which has an airlock that none of the current capsules have so they'll have to work out of a seed station launched in a single go or we'll have to wait for a crew Starship. That's a long ways off even if you don't account for Musk's habit of promising things are coming soon.

The cost of the ISS was not just the launches. The modules themselves were massively expensive to design, build, and test before they ever made it into a payload bay. For example, the Tranquility + Cupola modules together cost $400M just to build. This wouldn’t change that much just because the launch costs go down, even with newer tech (Bigelow modules would still cost on the order of $100M a pop). If you want to put humans in space for long periods of time without killing them, the things you put them into are going to be complex and expensive.

To me it would make a lot more sense to boost the ISS to a higher orbit so future industry can repurpose the materials on it, rather than throw the entire thing away because it’s old.

The ISS was years from being finished two decades ago. It was still getting new modules in the 2010s. Your timeline is way off, so you might want to double check whatever your basis is for thinking this is a recurring call over two decades.

For historical context: the first module didn't launch until November 1998. The Cupola everyone loves to see in photos was 2010. The current tech boom is older than the finished ISS.

Feels like longer but the date is always changing just recently back in 2018 the plan under the Trump admin was to halt funding in 2025 [0], in 2008 the planned date was 2016 [1]. It seems like the decommissioning is always planned for the next administration to deal with.

With anything space in particular I don't hold my breath for anything planned beyond the current administration unless it's something fairly small like a rover or satellite [-1] because every administration comes in and wants to have their own project be the one so they "reevaluate" and "reassess" the plans to make them more or less grandiose as suits their current economic stance.

[-1] They're usually small enough they can get a nice big cash infusion right up front so there's a sunk cost to keep funding where plans are relatively cheap.

[0] https://spaceflightnow.com/2018/05/20/nasa-wrestles-with-wha...

[1] https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/GAOREPORTS-GAO-08-581T/h... ^F "planned decommissioning in fiscal year 2016."

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