After the International Space Station: National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Industry, and the Future of Commercial Spaceflight in Low-Earth Orbit

Abstract

Abstract The International Space Station (ISS) is heralded as a political and engineering success that provides a firm foothold for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and its international partners to send crews to visit and operate in low-Earth orbit (LEO). For current NASA leadership, the future of LEO rests in the hands of U.S. private industry in which NASA is a buyer of services, including human spaceflight services, which are owned and operated by private companies. The NASA human spaceflight strategy is to send crew missions to cislunar space and to transition ISS capabilities over to commercial habitats and platforms in LEO by the 2020s. This article argues that it is unlikely that market forces and industry capabilities will be strong enough by the mid-2020s to support commercial habitats without direct NASA support. Therefore, NASA should study the costs and timelines of extending the ISS past the mid-2020s versus procuring short-duration commercial platforms. If cislunar h...