The International Space Station is suffering. Its replacement will shape the future of space exploration

Humans now have had a continuous presence in space for 20 years thanks athe meInternational Space Station (ISS), but the facility is unlikely to survive in the next decade. What comes next could shape the future of space exploration.

Unsurprisingly, the ISS is starting to show its age. Earlier this month, astronauts finally fixed an air leak that had been going on for more than a year – and that’s just one of the litanies of maintenance problems the station has dealt with recently.

At the moment, funding for the station will run out in 2024, and while it is likely to be extended until 2028, few expect any commitments beyond that point. Despite this, all the major space agencies in the world claim that humanity needs a permanent presence inISorbit arth. How this will be achieved still seems uncertain, however, and could have a significant impact on space travel in the coming decades.

NASA has made no secret of its desire to commercialize the space industry as much as possible, no doubt buoyed by the rapid progress SpaceX has made since the turn of the century and cost savings. he hass reached at that time. The rationale is that the agency’s limited budget should go towards ambitious goals such as getting humans to Mars or building foundations on moon.

Space stations are no different, and NASA has made it clear that it wants private companies to step in. “It’s time for NASA to start setting its goals towards deep space exploration and let the entrepreneurs move behind us,” Phil McAlister, director of commercial space flight development at NASA, said Wired.

What it might look like is still a bit unclear. Last year, the agency announced that private companies would be allowed to use the space station for a fee with the aim of promoting a low-Earth orbit economy. But so far most of the brands buyers have been looking for a out-of-this-world public relations stunt rather than valid space activities.

NASA also signed an agreement with private space station builder Axiom to connect one of its modules to the space station in 2024, which the company plans to use as a stepping stone towards building its own commercial space station. The company’s CEO is a former NASA pprogram manager for the ISS, so if anyone wants to get it working, Axiom will.

But finding a way to make a profit won’t be easy. Bigelow Aerospace, which spent years developing inflatable space station modules and even sent one to the ISS for testing in 2016, was considering competing for the place Axiom took on the ISS, but founder Robert Bigelow said News from space that they decided not to bid because the funding offered by NASA was not enough.

And he said the prospects for a completely private space station in the near future are slim. “Marketing is not robust at all,” he said. “There must be substantial government subsidies for a period of time until industries are able to stand on their own feet.” A little less than two months later, the company laid off its entire workforce.

Other countries seem less optimistic about the prospect of divesting space stations to private industry, and are instead moving forward with plans for new national space stations. China has launched two prototype habitat modules over the past decade and plans to get started build a complete space station in the next year or two.

India plans to launch its first astronauts into space in 2022, with a space station scheduled for 2030. And Russia, the United States. “S. main partner of the ISS, also announced that it will build a new orbital space station after 2030 once the ISS is deactivated, according to the news agency Interfax.

Whether these plans will be implemented on schedule or at all is far from clear. But they signal a departure from the cooperative approach that underpinned the ISS, which it was perhaps his most important legacy, returns to a more nationalistic approach to space exploration. Similar tensions they already seem to be building with regards to upcoming missions at moon and the asteroid belt.

However, it seems there is to be something everyone can agree on. The huge wealth of discoveries that were built on the ISS have firmly established the need to build the space stations of the future. How they will appear still seems very uncertain, but there is no doubt that our persistent presence in space will not end anytime soon.

This article is edited by SingularityHub.