With this project falling behind, and the reducing likelihood of delays in the Lunar Gateway/Artemis program, I think there's a good chance that NASA and the ESA will not have access to a space station following the ISS's decommission. It's not the only "public-private" partnership for an ISS successor, but I don't think the other candidates are making much progress either.
I also thought that this quote was pretty amusing, and highlights the futility of trying to privately fund commercial station projects:
To bring in some much-needed cash, Axiom Space started selling seats for trips to the ISS on board SpaceX's Crew Dragon spacecraft.
It was also awarded a NASA contract to fund a space suit for the first crewed mission to the lunar surface, Artemis III.
But the suit appears to have been a massive distraction — not to mention a major money pit — from its plans to build a space station. SpaceX trips to the existing orbital outpost were also not a sustainable solution to Axiom Space's woes.
"Turns out that there's not a lot of billionaires that want to set aside their life for 18 months to go train to be an astronaut for the ISS," a former Axiom executive told Forbes.
It's sad because NASA is like one of the only few cool and good things about America. At least they have a few missions going, but we'll see how long that lasts before some private entity is sucking up what little money is left of their allowance.
Oh well...
CNSA is stepping up to do the real space exploration stuff. Lunar farside sample return is pretty damn cool and they're actually making good progress toward a human moon landing by 2030. There are going to be two more robotic ones before that, one with a rover and hopper to scout the best sites from the ground and one with some kind of ISRU test to make a permanent moon base more useful and viable.
china will be regularly shipping autonomously mined and refined lunar farside cryogenic helium-3 packages back to earth to fuel a network of De-He3 5 gigawatt commercial reactors when the U.S. is on it's 16th failing silicon valley funded Thiel-backed private space agency under the Barron Trump administration
NASA, at that point just a PR team of 3 appointees for the private sector, will be promising to restore satellite launch capacity to rebuild real-time communications between the east and west coast after roving bands of florida RV refugees strip the copper and vital electronics from every land line and data center in the central dust bowl
There are already 13 countries signed up to be a part of the International Lunar Research Station program. The most recent is Senegal which joined about two weeks ago.
Yemen would be a good place to launch space rockets from, just on a technical level. Low latitude, low humidity, ocean to the southeast.
cool glad my early morning sci-fi wishcasting has some basis in reality!
and i have been thinking about that in regards to Yemen lately. could see it being a future hub for space launches for the reasons you listed. also might have the highest density of rocket scientists in the world by then
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My favorite :agony-turbo: one of those is "we're not gonna put this lunar rover that we already built on a rocket that we're gonna launch anyway so :my-hero: can get more money"
Meanwhile China has I think three lunar rovers currently on the moon roving.
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They just couldn't think of a single better use for three thousand pounds of payload to solar orbit, right, sure.
The Falcon 9/heavy is the best amerikkkan launch system since Saturn but that's not a high bar.
Considering the Saturn rocket program was run pretty much entirely by paperclipped nazis, I'm gonna have to go ahead and say "nothing new under the sun."
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Call like any university and say "hey you got 3000 pounds of shit you want on a solar orbit? It might blow up, this is a test flight" And the answer will be "Yes, absolutely!"
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I would support the use of a nuclear weapon in space if it was used to evaporate that car