Humanity +1: People have been living on the space station for 20 years

I remember hearing about it and how expensive it'd be during the 90s and how they scaled it back. Quite crazy to realize we've had a space station chug with people living there for 20 continuous years. Tbh, it "disappeared" for me after the shuttle incident, and only comes up in post-apocalyptic movies...

https://arstechnica.com/science/202...space-station-flies-into-an-uncertain-future/

The Cold War had been concluded for less than a decade when NASA astronaut Bill Shepherd and two Russian cosmonauts, Sergei Krikalev and Yuri Gidzenko, crammed themselves into a Soyuz spacecraft and blasted into orbit on Halloween, 20 years ago.

Two days later their small spacecraft docked with the International Space Station, then a fraction of the size it is today. Their arrival would herald the beginning of what has since become 20 years of continuous habitation of the laboratory that NASA, leading an international partnership, would continue to build for another decade.

Born of a desire to smooth geopolitical tensions in the aftermath of the great conflict between the United States and Soviet Union, the space station partnership has more or less succeeded—the station has remained inhabited despite the space shuttle Columbia disaster in 2003, and later, nearly a decade of no US space transportation. NASA, Roscosmos, and the European, Japanese, and Canadian partners have been able to rely on one another.

Not that it has been easy. Tensions have existed from those very first moments on the station. Shepherd, who would serve as the first ISS commander over his more experienced cosmonaut counterparts, wanted to nickname the station “Alpha.” He had support for this from Krikalev, but some Russian space officials believed their earlier Mir space station had earned that honor. The new station, they believed, ought to be named “Beta.” NASA, too, had not signed off on this designation.

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Humans have lived in space longer than the iPod has existed
Nevertheless, Shepherd pressed ahead. He liked that Alpha was the first letter of the Greek alphabet, neither American nor Russian. So on the crew's first day aboard the station, during a space-to-ground call with NASA Administrator Dan Goldin, Shepherd said over the public loop, "The first expedition on the space station requests permission to take the radio call sign Alpha.”

Goldin was not expecting this, and he spoke away from the microphone for a few moments, conferring with others on the ground. Then he came back and said the name “Station Alpha” was authorized for the duration of Shepherd’s nearly four-month expedition.

This suited the crew, and Shepherd replied, "Out, from Space Station Alpha." Since then, more than five dozen other crews have rotated onto the International Space Station, most recently Expedition 63, which launched in mid-October. Always, in the two decades since, there have been at least two humans onboard.

Days before the most recent launch to the space station from Kazakhstan, the mission's NASA crew member, Kate Rubins, addressed this anniversary in the crew’s final pre-flight news conference.

“I think the International Space Station is one of the most incredible engineering achievements in human history,” she said. “It is quite a marvel to see such a giant machine that was built entirely by humans and flown off the surface of Earth still persists in space 20 years later."

The station is unique in that no one has ever built such a large spacecraft in orbit, nor flown it so long. In that sense, it tests the limits of what is possible every day, and it is worth thinking about the achievements of the station. These go far beyond geopolitics and range from science to exploration to the commercialization of space. And yet there is growing concern that the space station may be retired before there is a replacement, soon ending our two decades in orbit. Moreover, we could fritter away much of the value we have gained from such an outpost.

“This is critically important,” said NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine about planning for a future in low-Earth orbit. “And it’s something that never gets funded.”

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The second half of that article goes into it.

NASA trying to encourage private industry to start their own, but no one/conssortium going to spend mega billions to build a new one and want more handouts than a Iowan farmer on opioids.

The viable track is for companies to build modules or attachments to the ISS to jump start near space efforts.