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A better analogy would be if the Jamestown settlers had spent 10 years floating in the English Channel being resupplied by rowing boat rather than actually getting on with the business of crossing the ocean and settling somewhere. The whole programme is frankly a total waste of time and money which is a huge distraction to actually making any progress in manned space exploration.

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I'm not saying you're wrong, but every announcement from NASA about the ISS seems to have the tone of "It may be in LEO, but it's an invaluable research platform teaching us lessons that are directly transferable to colonizing the Moon/Mars". Is that an unfair summary of what's happening on the ISS?

Yeah the ISS is where we're learning how to actually run a long term space habitat. Each station has taught us more about tons of things that happen here on Earth by removing the effects of gravity so that other forces with much smaller effects can be examined and harnessed. There are other ways we might have gotten this data but there's a lot to be said for having a person there to repair anything that's gone wrong or to change experimental apparatus instead of having to launch it all again.

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