For 25 years, the ISS was the only address humans kept beyond Earth.
It is closing.
What replaces it is not one station; it is an orbital economy, built by private companies and designed to manufacture things that cannot be made on the ground.In November 2000, two Russian cosmonauts and one American astronaut moved into the International Space Station and did not come back for months.
Someone has been living up there continuously ever since.
Twenty-five years, nearly 300 people from 26 countries, and more scientific experiments than most institutions on Earth will ever run, all of it in a laboratory the size of a football field, orbiting at 28,000 kilometres per hour.The ISS cost more than $150 billion to build and costs the US roughly $3 billion per year to operate.
