When the day when the International Space Station retires, NASA has no plans of replacing it with another orbital outpost. Instead, the space agency is planning on saving money by leaving space station development to private companies, reports CNBC.
NASA will be offering up to $400 million for the best proposals. Even with such big prize money, the space agency is aiming to save around $1 billion per year that it would use to spend on new missions instead of spending it on maintenance, showing a significant shift in the agency’s priorities oriented around private space tech.
NASA to focus more on exploration
While NASA has been at the forefront of the space industry, it has no plans in buying an entire space station of its own. The space agency doesn’t have any plans to spend money on the development of a new orbital outpost — NASA director of commercial spaceflight Phil McAlister told CNBC that “NASA will only be paying for the part that we need.”
“It was explicitly part of the original announcement for proposals that we expected cost-sharing,” McAlister added. “Going forward, we do not anticipate paying for the entire commercial destinations. We don’t think that’s appropriate, as the companies are going to own the intellectual property and they’re going to be able to sell that capability to non-NASA customers.”
With its anticipated $1 billion in annual savings from cost-cutting and outsourcing space tech, McAlister says the space agency can shift its focus away from developing orbital tech to exploring distant worlds.
ISS showing signs of aging
“We can use that savings — that we project to be on the order of a billion to a billion-and-a-half dollars [annually] — for our deep space missions and aspirations,” McAlister told CNBC.
Speaking of the International Space Station, recently Russian cosmonauts aboard the ISS discovered several new cracks in its wall. The cosmonauts have warned that these cracks can become wider as time passes.
This shows that the ISS is aging. After being permanently occupied for over two decades, the space laboratory is starting to accumulate cracks and fissures that haven’t posed any threat so far to the crew, but that could change in a few years.
