There's a flagpole atop the roof of Building 30 at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, proudly streaming Old Glory in the sultry Texas summer wind. On the very first closed-door tour I got of the restored Apollo Mission Operations Control room more than a decade ago, my tour guide pointed out the flag as we entered the building's lobby. "That flag," he said, smiling, "flies whenever there is an American in space. Thanks to the International Space Station (ISS), NASA has had a flag up there continuously since 1998. I hope it'll be up there forever."

Forever is a long time, but it seemed possible—after so many fits and starts, construction on the ISS was barreling forward. Columbia was still a member of the orbiter fleet. It felt like NASA had actual for-real momentum—a big project with a goal to work toward. We were building the world's highest-flying laboratory, and it was going to teach us everything we needed to know to send humans elsewhere in the solar system.

It's 2013, and the international partnership that helped fund the ISS is starting to crumble. NASA's manned space program, the only program ever to put human beings on another world, now lacks even a single rocket that can get people off of the Earth's surface. The six-person crew of the ISS rides up into low Earth orbit courtesy of Russia, while in America the government allocates an increasingly smaller percentage of the overall federal budget to NASA.

The current plan is for the ISS to be de-crewed in 2020—and then de-orbited. The crew will taper down the experiments; what valuable materials and components that can be removed will be ferried back to Earth. At some point in 2020, a final group of astronauts and cosmonauts will climb into a Soyuz, swing shut the hatch, and undock. The $100 billion laboratory will fall silent, and then some time later it will flare brightly as all of its laboriously crafted and carefully assembled 400 tons of hardware burns through re-entry and splashes into the ocean.

After 22 years, that flag will come down. There will be no more Americans in space.

A longer mission?

Plans change, though. The ISS was once scheduled for shutdown in 2016, but it had that deadline extended to 2020. And further extensions are definitely under consideration.

Space.com has an informative write-up of the ISS' future, which touches on the possibility of keeping the station crewed and operational past the current 2020 deadline. From a purely technical standpoint, there's no problem at all; according to William Gerstenmaier, NASA's associate administrator for Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate, the ISS itself is exhibiting a lower component failure rate than anticipated, and the station is in fine condition. "The hardware is looking pretty good overall," he said at the July 29 meeting of the NASA Advisory Council Human Exploration and Operations Committee.

But as the article notes, the continued operation of the ISS relies on money, a significant fraction of which comes from outside the United States—the "international partners" that put the "I" in "ISS." Russia, Japan, Canada, and a multitude of European nations (via ESA, the European Space Agency) all have a part to play and a cost to pay, and extending the ISS' life beyond the current 2020 deadline would require the extension of a long list of partnerships between nations with wildly varying political goals and budgetary issues. Sam Scimemi, the director of the ISS for NASA's Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate, noted in the same July 29 meeting that serious talks with the international partners on ISS extensions haven't yet occurred. "We're in a unique situation with each of the other partners," he noted. "The Canadians, the Japanese, and the Europeans are in a different place... It goes to politics in their own countries."

NASA's Scimemi laments it's unlikely that the confluence of events that brought about the ISS international partnership will ever occur again; that partnership enabled the ISS' design and construction, and that partnership keeps it crewed. Scimemi points out that the Russians would likely be willing to continue participating in the ISS effort post-2020, but the true value of the ISS partner program is the partners themselves.

Further, NASA feels that flights to Mars and perhaps other places in the solar system will require the ISS—not as a staging ground or launch platform, but rather as a research and test facility to solve medical and life-support issues. Testing humans and equipment on the ISS is the only viable method for truly simulating long-duration interplanetary space flight and the long-term exposure to microgravity and radiation that comes with it. The current ISS mission time frame doesn't provide room for any such Mars-focused experimentation to be carried out until at least 2026; pulling those experiments forward means disrupting a massively complex timeline of other medical and scientific experiments already in process and approved to fly.

Out of time and in the woods

So what do we do? The situation isn't much changed from my last sad editorial in December; NASA still lacks a coherent vision that the public buys into, and it also lacks sufficient funding to execute a flagship manned mission in a timely fashion.

Luminaries like Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson bang the drum for more money for NASA; that's definitely something the agency could use, but the problem is deeper than that. NASA needs more than just money. NASA's manned space flight program needs to be left alone to do what it's repeatedly proven it does best and what commercial space won't be able to do: take risks and send highly trained people to other worlds to plant flags and make footprints. It won't be profitable, but it's vitally important—and only a government-funded agency can afford to do it.

The commercial space arena, with its sexy new entrants like SpaceX, has an undeniable and huge role to play in the future of manned and unmanned space flight. But commercial space must be profitable; even with visionaries like Elon Musk directing the rockets, commercial space eventually needs some reward to offset the risk. Commercial space won't put the first humans on an asteroid or on Mars—or on Europa, Titan, or anywhere else in the solar system.

Those kinds of missions, involving humans going boldly where no one has gone before, should be the domain of government-funded agencies—agencies that can carry the burden of long-term risk without requiring it to be balanced by a quantified financial reward. NASA's manned space program should be given a mission that should make our jaws drop, and it should be given the freedom to accomplish that mission without politicians poking their fingers into the works. And the private sector should be able to reap the benefits of NASA's trail blazing.

The situation with the ISS is heartbreaking, and I say that as someone who worked for several years helping to build some of the ISS hardware currently whizzing by in orbit above our heads. De-crewing the station in 2020 would be a repeat of ending the lunar missions in 1972—we'll be abandoning the ship just when we're really starting to figure out how to fly it well. The ISS has taught us a lot of things—it's the biggest microgravity construction effort ever, and we've learned a tremendous amount about how to build things in space, for example—but it has plenty of things left to teach us, too. We're just reaching the point where manned commercial transport to the ISS will become a reality within the next few years, which will give those commercial space companies a temporary destination to reach while they figure out how (or even if) to build their own orbiting way stations.

The public's interest is fickle, and a successful space program cannot be beholden fully to political tides. For all the cost overruns of the ISS' design and construction, NASA needs it orbiting up there to do greater things, and the cost of keeping it orbiting is one that we should be more than willing to pay.

The flag needs to keep flying.

Listing image by NASA