What happens next with NASA’s plan to replace the ISS? Source: “It could get ugly”

"It reminds me of sort of Lucy and Charlie Brown with the football."

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[Tactical Finesse]

The problem is quite simple. You want to make commercial space stations; how do they pay the bills they accrue by charging to what customers?

It is the same thing as "privatize" health insurance or private power utilities. Okay fine--you make something non-government infra, that you want people to rely on...but don't want to fund with taxes--so everyone has to pay more for it, so that it turns a profit for someone. And then, down the line, people complain when something that is systemitized and designed to be profitable and not affordable/accessible, is not affordable.

 

[Tactical Finesse]

Private space stations can't get by on bullshit about the supposed value they are producing. They need actual selfish paying customers who insist on getting their money's worth. Airy handwaving about supposed public benefit won't cut it.

If you are feeding at the trough you don't want to be forced to justify your consumption, and will argue strongly against this sort of thing as weak and shortsighted. But the great strength of the private approach is that it cuts through the self-serving bullshit about the supposed value being produced and forces the efforts to actually demonstrate that value in the hard unforgiving market.

Sorry, the entire years-long LLM bubble is calling on Line 4, and asking to speak to you.

 

[Tactical Finesse]

Except that there is vast demand for healthcare and modern society runs on power.

There is very little economic demand for a permanent NASA run space station. The scientific and development benefits are clear, but it’s never going to be anything but a money sink. So the private market costs will be astronomical (heh).

Oh I know--my point was that there are negative consequences for establishing this, presuming for argument they can do it. At the moment there's no reason any commercial entity would do this. Maybe sometime in the future they might. It depends on how skeptical or cynical you are about the Moon landing/base efforts.

BUT, there are consequences.

Namely that I can guarantee you that if this commercialization effort is successful--everyone will be unhappy about it. Just like people are rather upset at PG&E for killing more people as a result of wildfires due to their deferred maintenance practices than even prolific serial killers. Oh, and LOL ERCOT. And UHC had to hire a new CEO because--well you know. What has commercial rocketry gotten us? Some rich jerks going to space and shouting YAHOO when they landed--and a whole lot of nothing for anyone else.

 

[Tactical Finesse]

Sure, bubbles occur even in the private sector, because no one is perfectly prescient. Will LLMs do what they are promised? We can't know until the experiment is run.

But what the private sector does is respond to the evidence of success or failure. Efforts that don't work are brutally pruned away. This is unlike in the public sector, where failure can persist for decades, even generations, even with unambiguous evidence the approach has failed. Just look at NASA for ample evidence of this.

Does it?

It is now 2026. Elon Musk has been promising self-driving cars "next year" every year for over 10 years now. Tesla stock has a P/E of 350! Please explain how the private sector has responded to his evidence of failure...other than handing him even more money.

The myth of the efficient and rational private sector is a myth.

 

[Tactical Finesse]

Yeah this strikes me as more what Eric began with. NASA is bad with change. NASA is always bad with change. NASA has never and likely will never be good with change.

NASA can't see an alternative because the reality is NASA has owned and operated its own station for 30 years and change is hard.

Change is expensive and change costs money--and there's also opportunity cost to it. And NASA's budget is a pinball that Congress loves to meddle in (See Senate Launch System), combined with political appointees running who sometimes know or don't know what they are doing.

 

[Tactical Finesse]

The problem is Congress's spending habits. If NASA owns the station then Congress has fine control over where and how the money is spent and it inevitably goes to pork. By outsourcing ownership, even though it's more expensive than an in-house station should cost, the bulk of the money will at least go to actually building and operating the station.

Or, more likely:

1. It'll never be built because there's no profit in it. Same as that time ANWR was leased to oil companies in Trump's 1st term and no drilling ever happens. Or;
2. The people who "build it" will make like Verizon in New Jersey, and take the billions and knowingly and intentionally never deliver the product.