> Once the station reaches the end of its life, NASA intends to transition its activities in low-Earth orbit onto private space stations, and it has funded initial development work by Axiom Space, Northrop Grumman, Blue Origin, and Voyager Space.

One publication I read made a couple of relevant points:

NASA should be careful about privatization and subcontracting, as it replaces NASA top-notch engineers with contract managers and oversight. Most engineers aren't interested in that work, and the skills don't stay sharp.

Also, it said that Gateway, the space station planned to orbit the Moon, is considered the conceptual descendent of ISS.

Much more here: https://nap.nationalacademies.org/cart/download.cgi?record_i...

IMHO NASA should focus on the cutting edge, pushing the frontiers of space and technology. I'm glad they stopped bothering with orbital launch, which they've done for over 60 years - many countries and many private companies can do that now. I'm not sure where ISS falls - LEO is obviously relatively common technology, but habitation in orbit? Space stations orbiting the Moon are the kind of thing where NASA should aim.

I wonder what kind of hardware debugging could be used to find the source of the leak. Could they spacewalk to the exterior of the tunnel and then emit some kind of detectible but inert gas from the interior to see where it appears outside? I suppose even if you found the leak there would still be some challenges in sealing it, especially if it's a growing leak like the data suggests. Would be a good experience for future space station maintenance though.

It's hard to imagine US/Russian relations improving in the coming years. It might be easier and safer to retire the ISS sooner rather than later.

There are rumors out there in the spacefaring community, wallpapered pretty heavily and media/google censored, regarding the astronaut responsible: https://www.newsweek.com/russia-could-take-legal-action-agai...

Basically the full workup describes her having a mental breakdown and just making life up there more and more miserable, saying "take me home or I'll escalate" followed by many cycles of not being taken home and escalating. It includes stealing/losing most tools and equipment and "losing them" to the vacuum of space, drilling holes in the space station, and let us diplomatically say... very poor hygiene related to human waste. The astronaut involved basically quit doing any work. Supposedly this ruined the station and basically assured that it be taken offline.

The joys of HN is finding experts in just about anything, so...

Assuming that NASA is correct about this leak being associated with an interior or exterior weld, what can we learn from the rate of growth of the leak? I assume (with no domain knowledge, seeking enlightenment!) that a leak like this is big enough to reflect a fracture in the weld, and not merely air sneaking past a tiny flaw; and I assume its growth means that the fracture itself is growing, under the combination of load (atmospheric pressure on one side) and cycling (thermal, etc). Is a fracture like this likely to continue to grow in a linear-ish domain, or is there a point where propagation goes non-linear assuming the loads stay constant-ish? Is this even a sane question to ask?

When I read this I understood _cracking_ in its sense of software piracy aka "hacking."

A mental subprocesses spawned to predict whether the cracking was _of_ the systems on the station—possibly inspired by that movie trailer I saw for the thriller about a new cold war in space after a nuclear war—or _from_ the space station, by bored occupants, either of their own systems or of some system they interact with on the ground.

A bit deflated by the reality, tbh.