In 2025, the company hopes to begin attaching modules to the ISS, which could eventually be detached to form its own station that could be rented out to paying customers. One of those companies, Axiom Space, has already been transporting paying astronauts on SpaceX rockets into orbit. These could become small research laboratories or destinations for space tourists, maintaining humanity's presence in orbit around our planet. It has also begun awarding contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars to companies to develop new space stations. Nasa has already outsourced the transportation of humans to low Earth orbit to companies SpaceX and Boeing in the US. In Earth orbit, the hope is that new commercial space stations will take the place of the ISS. What will succeed the ISS is, however, already underway. "They've spoken about going their own way, and they will not be accepted given their invasion of Ukraine." "The Russians are not going to be participating any longer," says Cathy Lewis, a space historian from the National Air and Space Museum in the US. While the collaboration has stood for the time being, such a partnership seems unlikely again in the near future. Russia's recent invasion of Ukraine has given the project its sternest test yet. Regardless, the end of the ISS will bring to an end an impressive display of human collaboration, one that has outlasted wars and conflicts on our planet. "We could not have skipped the space station," agrees de Winne. "It changed our minds about what it means to be a space-faring civilisation," she says. Prior to its launch we had dipped our toes into long-duration spaceflight, with Russian cosmonauts spending upwards of a year on their Mir space station, but the ISS has been on another level, says Laura Forczyk, a space analyst at the US consulting firm Astralytical. However, rather than research, some argue the station's main accomplishment was solidifying humanity as a space-faring species. "I think the future of human spaceflight is for billionaires and adventurers." "Sending people to space is hugely expensive," he says. He suggests nations should focus more on robotic missions, such as the wildly successful James Webb Space Telescope or ongoing missions to Mars. "It's certainly not been worthwhile just for pure science," he says. Lord Martin Rees, the UK's Astronomer Royal, says the price has been too high for the scientific return alone. Not everyone agrees the station has been such a success. "It's a once-in-a-lifetime experience, to work in an international partnership and move humanity forwards." Living and working on the station "was a fantastic experience," says Frank de Winne, an astronaut with the European Space Agency who visited the station twice, in 20. Research has included investigating diseases such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's, studying new states of matter, and developing ways to grow food in space such as lettuce and radishes. Thousands of scientific experiments have been conducted on the ISS, across both the US and Russian side of the station, and in European and Japanese-built modules that were also attached. However, the station's hardware is ageing, so in 2031 it will be de-orbited, brought back through Earth's atmosphere and crashed into the ocean. It has been continuously occupied since its first crew arrived in November 2000. The result has been a giant space station that would encompass a football field and weighs more than 400 tonnes, orbiting our planet at 18,000mph (28,980km/h), at a cost of at least $150bn (£120bn). This was an opportunity for the United States and Russia to open up this new era of working together." Russia's space industry was in dire straits. "It's really this great story of post-Cold War cooperation. "It was absolutely huge," says Wendy Whitman Cobb, a space policy expert from the US Air Force's School of Advanced Air and Space Studies. Most notably, it heralded a partnership between two embittered foes – the US and Russia – following the end of the Cold War and the fall of the Soviet Union. It has seen dozens of countries work together to build the largest human-built construction in space. The ISS project began in 1998 with the launch of Russia's Zarya module, the first component of the station. Instead, it could herald an exciting future of human spaceflight that will hopefully already be underway. But that dramatic finale doesn't need to be a sombre occasion. In eight years, the International Space Station (ISS) – a bastion of global collaboration and human ability – will end.
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