The International Space Station is retiring, and Blue Origin plans to develop a commercial space station

#Blue Origin plans to build a commercial space station in 2030 #At the end of March 2001, Russia's Mir space station entered the atmosphere and burned down, completing its historical mission, so far, the vast universe is only left with the International Space Station jointly built and used by 16 countries such as the United States, Japan, and Russia, as well as our Chinese Tiangong space station. It is expected that next year, China's space station will be officially completed, opening its arms to space agencies around the world to jointly explore the vast unknown universe. However, the International Space Station, which began construction in 1998, is dying of old age, because the service life of the space station is only 10-15 years, according to 15 years, it should have been retired 8 years ago, but at that time, its various hardware performance was still good, and it has been working until now. But since the previous year, although there has been no major accident on the International Space Station, small glitches have been continuous, such as 19 years of air leakage, last year's cabin cracks, last month it suddenly lost its bearing in space, and flipped 57 °, the failure lasted for 30 minutes, to the Soyuz MS-18 spacecraft thruster ignition test of a cold sweat. All indications are that the International Space Station is really old.

The cost of the International Space Station at that time was about $100 billion, which was too much of a financial burden for the two years of tightening the belt, so NASA announced earlier this year that it would award $400 million to space companies in the form of private contracts, allowing NASA to transition from the International Space Station to the new station, so the American business leaders took over the baton.

A few days ago, Blue Origin, founded by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, announced that it would work with Sierra Aerospace, a subsidiary of Sierra Nevada, to build a commercial space station called "Orbital Reef", with an internal space of 830 cubic meters, which can accommodate up to 10 people, each cabin is equipped with "large windows", which will operate at an altitude of 500 kilometers above the ground, using blue origin's new Glenn rocket launch components, Boeing's Starliner spacecraft is responsible for transporting astronauts, Mountain Space's Dreamcatcher spacecraft are responsible for transporting supplies.

As soon as the news came out, netizens said that these three companies are old ace pigeons: the first flight time of the "New Glen" rocket has not yet been determined, but SpaceX has launched a reusable Falcon series rocket last year; Boeing's current spacecraft software bug has reached the point where NASA needs to solve it; and the dreamer of Mountain Space Company has developed for many years, and has only completed a simple test flight of 3 kilometers of low-altitude hoisting to release the autonomous return to the landing field, and it is not certain when it will be able to fly to the International Space Station.

But in any case, the International Space Station has entered the countdown to decommissioning, Russia has publicly stated that it will withdraw from the International Space Station project in 2024, and at that time, China's space station is likely to become the only human experiment space in the Earth orbit, so these three companies must seize the time, maybe they can be negative and positive.