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Buzz Aldrin has said that NASA should stop spending $3.5 billion per year on the International Space Station and relinquish low Earth orbit activities to private companies, such as SpaceX, Orbital ATK, Boeing, Bigelow Aerospace, and Axiom Space. This would allow for the funding of "cyclers" to enable a base on the moon and eventually a permanent presence on Mars:
http://www.space.com/36787-buzz-aldrin-retire-international-space-station-for-mars.html
Establishing private outposts in LEO is just the first step in Aldrin's plan for Mars colonization, which depends heavily on "cyclers" — spacecraft that move continuously between two cosmic destinations, efficiently delivering people and cargo back and forth. "The foundation of human transportation is the cycler," the 87-year-old former astronaut said. "Very rugged, so it'll last 30 years or so; no external moving parts."
Step two involves the international spaceflight community coming together to build cyclers that ply cislunar space, taking people on trips to the moon and back. Such spacecraft, and the activities they enable, would allow the construction of a crewed lunar base, where humanity could learn and test the techniques required for Mars colonization, such as how to manufacture propellant from local resources, Aldrin said. Then would come Earth-Mars cyclers, which Aldrin described as "an evolutionary development" of the prior cyclers.
[...] NASA officials have repeatedly said that the ISS is a key part of the agency's "Journey to Mars" vision, which aims to get astronauts to the vicinity of the Red Planet sometime in the 2030s.
Is the ISS a key part of the "Journey to Mars" or a key roadblock?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday May 11 2017, @10:31PM
Is the ISS really useful? If we develop inflatable module technology some more, it might be possible to get an ISS-sized station in orbit for much cheaper than the ISS construction cost. Launch costs have also fallen.
My view is that for what was spent on the ISS, we could have launched two or three ISS into space any point in the past few decades just by not using the Space Shuttle (and retiring the Shuttle back in 1990) and eliminating the international aspect of the ISS, but otherwise keeping its capabilities.
Not using the Shuttle and instead discontinuing the Shuttle in 1990 would have resulted in a modest hit to the volume of individual station components, but an enormous reduction in launch costs. I estimate around 30 billion USD.
One would see somewhat similar savings from cutting out the meandering path that the ISS took from beefy national prestige project to enormous international money sink which among other things required numerous redesigns of the station to incorporate projects from all the ISS partners. I think at least 20 billion USD.
Then there would be some modest economies of scale from building multiple copies of the ISS structure resulting in the final estimates of 2-3 structures for 100 billion USD. That's not even discussing the enormous savings possible from taking NASA out of the loop or the significant improvement from putting SpaceX in the loop, particularly, its Falcon Heavy.