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Expanding, And Eventually Replacing, The International Space Station:
Aboard the International Space Station (ISS), humanity has managed to maintain an uninterrupted foothold in low Earth orbit for just shy of 20 years. There are people reading these words who have had the ISS orbiting overhead for their entire lives, the first generation born into a truly spacefaring civilization.
But as the saying goes, what goes up must eventually come down. The ISS is at too low of an altitude to remain in orbit indefinitely, and core modules of the structure are already operating years beyond their original design lifetimes. As difficult a decision as it might be for the countries involved, in the not too distant future the $150 billion orbiting outpost will have to be abandoned.
Naturally there's some debate as to how far off that day is. NASA officially plans to support the Station until at least 2024, and an extension to 2028 or 2030 is considered very likely. Political tensions have made it difficult to get a similar commitment out of the Russian space agency, Roscosmos, but its expected they'll continue crewing and maintaining their segment as long as NASA does the same. Afterwards, it's possible Roscosmos will attempt to salvage some of their modules from the ISS so they can be used on a future station.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 05 2020, @12:21AM
You're pretty close to correct. Endeavour cost $2.2 billion, but that was mostly assembly, they already had most of the parts. It would probably have been somewhere in the $5-$10 billion range for a new orbiter from scratch, but they didn't need a huge fleet of shuttles, so the per unit cost isn't very important.
As for launch costs, that's about right. It cost about the same, inflation adjusted, to launch a Shuttle as it did to launch Apollo, even though it was much less capable and turned out to be not very reliable either.