What is the point of having a space station? I guess it justifies a steady stream of funding in the way that a program like Apollo did not. It seems there is l

What is the point of having a space station? I guess it justifies a steady stream of funding in the way that a program like Apollo did not. It seems there is little science of value happening there, and most of that is the science of keeping primates alive in space. I think some claims are either that building it causes some useful basic research and that it is good practice for some future crude space mission. For the first claim, I don’t really see why the ISS is better than the regular aviation research done by nasa combined with the kind of space missions that don’t involve primates (telescopes and rovers and probes and suchlike), especially when you consider the number that might be attempted without so much of the budget going to the ISS. For the second claim I would observe first that there have not been many missions for all this practice and I will secondly say that I don’t really understand the point of these proposed future missions anyway. Mostly I see the ISS as an enormous opportunity cost preventing nasa budgets from being spent on more scientifically interesting missions. But maybe there’s some advantage I don’t see, or removing the ISS wouldn’t make that much more money for the kind of missions I do think are worthwhile.