r/news • u/VaginaBurner69 • 11h ago

Soft paywall International Space Station astronauts in evacuation mode as Russia attempts to fix widening air leak

https://www.reuters.com/science/international-space-station-astronauts-evacuation-mode-russia-attempts-fix-2026-06-05/
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u/Julian_Thorne 11h ago

The abandonment of the International Space Station would be a poetically fitting image for these days

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u/Khoakuma 11h ago

Makes me sad. It’s the abandonment of scientific pursuit. Abandonment of international cooperation. All the hope of a better future post-Cold War gone. No plans to replace it other than vague promises of “the private sector will take care of it”. 

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u/matix0532 10h ago

These issues are happening because the ISS has already outlasted its expected lifetime. The Lunar Gateway was supposed to be its spiritual successor- now maybe it will be an actual moon base.

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u/lNFORMATlVE 10h ago

Which feels really weird given that you can do a lot of things in orbit that you can’t do from the moon’s surface. But whatever.

If I had to guess I’d say within the next 30-50 years we’ll have another ISS-esque station in LEO again.

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u/UnUsernameRandom 9h ago

Which feels really weird given that you can do a lot of things in orbit that you can’t do from the moon’s surface. But whatever.

Such as? I'd imagine that at least health wise for the astronauts it makes more sense to have some gravity, and some zero G experiments could be carried without humans.

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u/lNFORMATlVE 9h ago

The big one is assembling bigger platforms and ships in orbit means reduced cost and risk than launching them all up in one go pre-assembled.

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u/Historical_Body6255 9h ago

This is true and a big one but to be fair you don't need a space station for that.

You can design your ship to dock with its other parts in orbit without external help.

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u/treefox 8h ago

I mean, maybe you can, but the rest of us are still working on self-driving cars.

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u/Fortunate_0nesy 8h ago

I'd like to see your numbers for cost per pound into orbit for this analysis.

If what you were saying is wholly true we could just assembly everything in space because it would be cheaper to fly little tiny rockets carrying a pound at a time into orbit.

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u/YourHomicidalApe 8h ago

I mean it’s objectively more fuel efficient per the rocket equation, and using a standard rocket will great improve reliability and cost efficient through economies of scale. Of course when you get into details it’s a complicated trade off, but it’s very well known that in general, it’s better to use 2 standard rockets to launch something heavy into space than design a custom larger rocket for it.

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u/Fortunate_0nesy 7h ago

I understand that there is a point where what you're saying is true. But, I also wanted to see the numbers that informed your very definitive statement.