Wonder who would be interested in such a thing, google and spaceX are really the only two that come to mind, and I honestly can't come up with much of a reason for google to buy it.
However, I can't imagine why any commercial entity would be interested in burning cash in LEO, unless they have a very lucrative microgravity production requirement. But so far that scenario has just been a fable.
And more significantly, the infrastructure to get them up there, support the operation, and return them safely.
Is there a elevation that would be a stable orbit? Why not just boost it to that point?
If science were our goal we could have done much more science with the same money.
I strongly disagree with this statement. Here are 1052 pages of summaries of the results of scientific experiments on the ISS.
http://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/atoms/files/iss_tech...
But a lot of those experiments are "let's see what X does ... in space!", or rather, "in microgravity!." When all you have is a hammer, then you will do a lot of hammer science. But it's not that transferable, except in the most vague of terms - which that document does over and over.
To quantify it, that's 1052 pages of summaries across 11 years. And not all of them are science. Call it 95 pages of summaries per year. BTW, it's about 550 individual items, so 50 per year.
ISS cost, what, $100-$150 billion over 20 years, or 5-7 billion/year? The NIH budget is $32 billion/year, which goes to 50,000 grants. That's about 6x larger. In terms of science per dollar, I'm pretty sure an equivalent summary of the NIH-funded research would exceed 6x95 = ~600 pages.
The other definition of "good" is "better than average". For example, if microgravity gave a significantly better to make protein crystals for x-ray analysis, then that would be great science. But in practice, no, it isn't. There are only a handful of crystallization experiments in those 11 years of experiments, and one of the things we've found out is that ultra-centrifuges are more useful than microgravity. A lot cheaper too.
The quality of the science is about average for the fields I'm used to, and the cost is much higher. That's why I say "there hasn't been much good science" out of the ISS.
Farther orbits are just fine. SNAP-10A, a Soviet nuclear reactor, is in a 1,300-kilometer orbit which won't decay for 4,000 years (estimated).
"Stable" is also very relative. The Earth has been in a stable orbit for a few billion years, though it's not at a Lagrange point. A satellite in GEO has an effectively unlimited orbital life.
> The US-A programme was responsible for orbiting a total of 33 nuclear reactors, 31 of them BES-5 types with a capacity of providing about two kilowatts of power for the radar unit. In addition, in 1987 the Soviets launched two larger TOPAZ nuclear reactors (six kilowatts) in Kosmos satellites (Kosmos 1818 and Kosmos 1867) which were each capable of 6 months of operation.
SNAP-10A is a US nuclear reactor (the only US one launched, apparently), though the Soviets have launched bunches (just not that one.)
There are many trade offs involved but simply replacing it in 20 years is a much better plan.
It has ~100 commercial off-the-shelf Thinkpads on board¹, so none of those are radiation hardened for sure. I can't find any information on whether the mission critical computer systems are radiation hardened or not.
¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Space_Station#Co...
That's still selling it.