Comment by omegaworks

That is something NASA has already been planning for a while now.

https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/iss-deorbit-...

The Biden administration released an RFP a year ago to exactly that end. IIRC, there was an $800+ million contract awarded.

The ISS is essentially worthless and the contract to deorbit has already been given to SpaceX (during the Biden administration no less.) There is no useful (much less economically sensible) research being done on the ISS. If you consult NASA FAQs, the way they like to justify it to the public is the ISS is a center for research that will help humanity live in space. That's bullshit. We figured out decades ago that human bodies start breaking down after more than a few months in microgravity and there's really fuck-all that can be done about that. Pursuing spin habs is one possible avenue for the future, but the ISS isn't one. It's dead end technology.

And on the topic of dead end technology, let's face the fact that the ISS is just Mir 2 with US participation. The DOS-8 module it's built around is the module Mir 2 was to be built around, Mir (1) being DOS-7, and the previous DOSes were the Salyut stations. Direct hardware lineage. The only reason these things exist in the first place is because the Soviet Union though space stations would be good for earth observation, a role they are wholly obsolete in now, but once the Soviet Union started building something they liked to keep building it long after it made sense (see also, the Vostok capsule, which they are still using as a satellite bus to this day.). And the only reason the US is involved in this is literally welfare to the Russian aerospace industry to prevent their engineers from having to seek employment in Iran/etc. In this role too, it is obviously obsolete.

Now a word about Mars, because I can already sense somebody about to accuse me of being a senseless musk fanboy. Mars colonization makes no sense and musk is lying about pursuing it. For a Mars colony to actually become a "backup for humanity" of whatever drivel he claims, it would need to bootstrap itself into self sufficiency, which at the very least would require a viable economy for trading with Earth. No such economic plan for a Mars colony exists. Furthermore, SpaceX isn't even investing in the creation of the requisite colony hardware, the habitats and Martian industrial infrastructure which would be required to make it work. What they're actually doing is far more mundane; building rockets for launching satellite into Earth orbit. The Mars talk is just a recruitment tactic to pull in young idealistic engineers and get them to work long hours for cheap.