I mean, I share your crushing disappointment but I’m also not remotely surprised by this outcome. The ISS was lucky in that it succeeded in spite of the political climate that increasingly saw spaceflight as a negative activity because it didn’t turn a profit, and that political climate has dominated NASA’s agenda for the past forty-odd years. It’s why bad suppliers continued to get contracts despite mounting failures and costs, and why missions were constantly scaled back to “hobbyist” ambitions with rovers and probes instead of manned missions; a few neat photos, a few interesting experiments, and some mainstream press coverage frequently felt like the goal of a mission - the actual science was just icing on the cake.

Which is tragic, because it’s not NASA’s fault. The agency has continuously stepped up with grand ambitions to go to celestial bodies, try bold new technologies, do amazing new experiments, to expand our species’ reach beyond the limits of our own planet. It’s just always been sidelined by efforts in Congress to funnel more money into the Senate Launch System no matter what, or to curtail “boondoggle” mission objectives because they don’t make money, or simply to give money to preferred suppliers so they can get re-elected with the promise of “next term, I can get you what you want, super seriously”.

It’s infuriating and tragic in equal measure. Almost half a century of potential, squandered by those tasked with custodianship over an agency whose singular goal is to keep going further.

It's heartbreaking.

I don't think the ISS is geting retired in 2030. i think there's slightly too much political inertia. It's how it's continued even as its two largest members are on opposite sides of a fucking war.

Everything in NASA is a political entity, and we don't get the ISS without the US State Department scrambling in the post-USSR-collapse world to get american industry to prop up post-Soviet industry for fear its talent will sell their knowledge and equipment to the highest bidder (ie, iran, north korea, china, y'know, US adversary of the week) because there's no soviet OR russian funding for them anymore.

The people who howl about a "senate launch system" (a term that should say on Reddit with all the people screaming that Starliner needs a rescue mission like monday morning quarterbacks shouting at the ref) fundamentally do not understand how this whole shebang works. We don't have the ISS without political motivators to chop off half of Reagan's lofty, vain Freedom station proposal and merge it with the built and unflown parts of a Soviet Mir-2 as an inherently political move to try and entrap the newly-broken-up parts of the USSR in some soft power. And also try and cut the price tag down so the fed would actually pay for it during the clinton years, when Goldin's "Faster, Better, Cheaper" took hold at the agency.

And even though the political factors that led to the ISS are increasingly from another time (we're at war with them now), there's still a lot of political capital tied up in projecting soft power through the ISS that i don't think even the meager amount of international collaboration on Artemis and Gateway (or these "Artemis Accords") will be able to replace.

I do think neoliberalism and austerity politics are a massive fucking danger to our space program, the "commercial space revolution" is a "we're privatizing british rail again" but with enough licking of boot to make people believe it's a good idea even as our spaceflight capability grows more vulnerable as we start treating capability we should inherently strive to have as something that can be "purchased as a service from the market" (that we prop up but don't control)

I'm worried the ISS will never be replaced, and there will be no moon base, and this is the decline. and in a hundred years the world will be awestruck reading about things they'll never be able to do again.

But also I'm chronically depressed and that means I think some very irrationally pessimistic things sometimes, so who knows.