>>11532850>>11532470That technology isn't exactly hard (after all, all ISS really proved was we got the big stuff right the first time).
The real value of ISS is it stopped us from regressing ALL the way back to zero spaceflight capability. In the 50's and 60's we went from suborbital flights to rapidly iterating and learning on longer and higher space flights around Earth, culminating in a push all the way out to the first real destination in space, the Moon.
However, because we pushed so hard, we ended up having to carry unsustainable costs to run those Moon missions, and after a handful of successful ones the rest were cancelled and the technology mothballed.
To replace the old rockets they wanted to build a cheaply reusable launch vehicle, which would mean being able to put up more mass and do more missions for a fraction of the cost. Problem is, the last thing the government wanted to do after the Apollo program was to spend another shitload of money on space, so they agreed upon building what seemed to be the cheapest option. This caused the Shuttle program to fail in achieving literally any of its objectives by a huge margin.
To keep Shuttle alive, Space Station Freedom was proposed, which was eventually modified and built as the ISS. This kept the American (and to a similar extend the Soviet/Russian) manned space programs on life support for a long time.
Shuttle was finally cancelled after it killed a second group of 7 astronauts, which meant in the meantime they'd need to scramble to get other manned vehicles developed and ready to minimize the capability gap. We're finally going to be closing that gap with Dragon 2, and if Boeing ever gets their shit together Starliner will be available as well.
The money that NASA funneled into SpaceX to build Dragon, then Dragon 2, has allowed that company to become the most successful private space launch venture ever, by a huge margin. It's also let them set the stage for Starship, what Shuttle should have been.
