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from the Privatized-International-Space-Station-==-PISS? dept.
NASA may sell/lease parts of the International Space Station in the next decade:
NASA has signalled its intention to offload the International Space Station (ISS) some time in the 2020s. News of the sale appeared in the video below, at about the 14:15 mark [YouTube] when Bill Hill, NASA's deputy associate administrator for exploration systems development, ponders the ISS' role in future missions.
"Ultimately our desire is to hand the space station to either a commercial entity or some other commercial capability so that research can continue in low-Earth orbit. We figure that will be around the mid-20s."
Hill and the other speakers in the video explain how NASA is preparing for a crewed Mars mission and outline how the agency is now well and truly in the market for ideas about how to get it done.
Also at SpaceFlight Insider and TechCrunch.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 23 2016, @07:50AM
That was because the US intended to scrap the ISS, but it seems that privatizing the ISS is intended as an alternative to scrapping it, so it won't be needed. Heck, Russia could make a bid for the US parts of the ISS, and end up with almost an entire space station (there are still a few European and Japanese parts).
As for reusing the parts for a new space station, moving things that are already up there is cheaper than launching new stuff, and the entire ISS is built of modules that can be put together in different configurations. When they were still building it, modules were often moved around to make room for more modules.