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On 11 February 2018, the Washington Post reported on what it described as an internal NASA document reporters had obtained. The documents apparently lay out plans to end funding for the station by 2025 for a possible handover to private commercial entities, though they do not set out any specific plans to accomplish that goal: While the suggestion of a Trump-branded real estate venture in low-Earth orbit evoked by this article’s intro may be a bit of an oversell, Trump's proposed budget — which was released the next day — did include provisions to end funding for the ISS, and to support ventures that could lead to its privatization: What to do with the International Space Station at the conclusion of its mission has long been a topic of discussion. First established in 1998 with a planned fifteen-year lifespan, it has been an international collaboration organized by NASA with involvement from many nations including Russia, Japan, the European Space Agency, Canada, and Brazil, and it includes modules or experiments by these and other nations. A 2014 NASA Inspector General report estimated that the station will cost around 3 to 4 billion dollars a year to maintain safely moving forward, and that the life of the station could plausibly be extended to 2024 if specific safety concerns were addressed: A complicating factor, outside the more than $75 billion the United States has already invested in the station, is that there is currently no established plan for how to conclude operations on the ISS, which if left unattended would partially burn up in an uncontrolled fall through Earth’s atmosphere at some point— potentially causing harm on the ground. Russia, the largest non-United States stakeholder in the station, had been working to develop a new core for a future Russian space station that would be able to make use of the existing Russian modules already present on the station without destroying them through a de-orbit. However, since 2017, the Russian space program has said that they consider such an idea unfeasible, reiterating a desire to maintain the ISS with its partner nations. According to the document obtained by the Post, the Trump administration has no plans to de-orbit the station, either; their hope is evidently that selling the station to private funders will allow for the station to remain safely in orbit. Privatizing the ISS has long been proposed as a potential solution to the station’s future funding, but the 2018 budget proposal is the first time such a plan has been explicitly endorsed by a presidential administration. Some have expressed concerns that Trump's ISS plan, which is entirely dependent on the as yet untested assumption that there is enough interest in commercial ventures to raise the billions needed annually to keep the station running safely, serves to negate the U.S.'s substantial financial investment in the facility. Responding to rumors that Trump’s budget would end funding for the ISS, Republican Senator Ted. Cruz said: Bill Nelson, a Democratic senator from Florida and former astronaut also strongly objected to plans to privatize the station: Mark Mulqueen, the head of the space station program for Boeing Aerospace, NASA’s biggest ISS contractor, told The Post that he was against the idea: Still others have questioned the logistics of selling off an asset that, while mostly funded by the United States, is still an international collaboration involving the investment of many other nations. According to a report in Wired: It is factual that privatizing the International Space Station is an element of Trump’s fiscal plans for NASA. Those plans, however, remain vaguely described and largely untested, and whether they will actually be brought to fruition is therefore at best uncertain.
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