The Commercial Space Station Revolution
The ISS is amazing: it's the largest object ever built in space, and the most expensive single object on Earth. It's brought us many revolutionary discoveries and inventions. However, human spaceflight has stalled in low Earth orbit, despite having gone to the Moon 50 years ago. It has been the only destination, despite the dreams of many to travel the heavens. But as the space station nears the end of its life, NASA is opening it up to private enterprises, hoping that the civilian market will make good use of it rather than all that effort going to waste. One of the biggest hurdles to private involvement in the ISS has been research law. All discoveries and inventions on the ISS are public property - nothing can be patented, so there's little incentive for tech companies to conduct wildly expensive R&D on the ISS without reaping the profits. While NASA is loosening those restrictions in recent times, it's still a public platform. This is important, because withou...