I guess it’s inevitable.
They actually wanted to join the ISS effort, but were given a firm no and had no other option than to do pursue their own. [2]
I don't think we will see any other country-specific stations for a long time, but modular commercial stations that can be shared for research and potential business endeavors (hotels, specialized manufacturing, ...).
If efforts like SpaceX Starship actually succeed in very significantly lowering launch costs, that is. Right now it is simply not affordable either for nations or businesses. A single Starship would actually be a great temporary space station on it's own, comparable to the ISS in usable area.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_large_modular_space_st...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_of_the_International_...
But yeah, this is definitely a reason why I hope we can keep the ISS going and just keep building on it. Additional space stations should be for good reason (for example: orbiting the moon, or - my crazy dream scenario - one orbiting in the past-GEO graveyard orbit to collect and refurbish dead satellites).
That means we should allow China to participate in the ISS, too. There are some national security concerns, apparently, but we overcame those with the USSR/Russia, and China should be no different.
Realistically, maritime law might be a better reference, given that space stations and other spaceships are informally (if not formally) referred to as "ships".
There are a number of scary mould patches up there, and potentially other pathogens, with no real way to properly clean the whole thing.
But HN is consistent in admiring rocket launches without considering how pointless they are.
Bread and circuses. Nothing's changed since the gladiator days, have they?
The very presence of people on the ISS is "science". The whole point of the ISS is to investigate the effects of long-term space habitation on humans. Plus, the ISS itself is an experiment, demonstrating the feasibility of in-orbit assembly of complex human-habitable structures from individually-launched-and-deployed modules (on a scale far greater than its predecessor Mir). There are even recent examples of this, like Bigelow Aerospace's module demonstrating the feasibility of inflatable space structures.
On top of that, all sorts of other experiments take place on the ISS all the time. There is, mind you, a giant Wikipedia article listing the myriad of experiments done throughout the history of the ISS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_research_on_the_Int...
And SpaceX just brought back a bunch of samples from such experiments as recently as April: https://www.slashgear.com/spacexs-dragon-cargo-ship-returns-...
Not sure where you get the impression that the ISS ain't doing much science, but it's pretty trivial to find a plethora of information indicating the exact opposite.
The ISS orbits at only 250 miles, barely into LEO.
The wikipedia article has a long list of experiments, but the question is, "Do they actually contribute anything?"
Can you name one scientific result from an ISS experiment? I can't.
> the effects of long-term space habitation on humans.
Humans aren't colonizing anything in space. You've read too many scifi books.
Just because the experiments aren't as frequently cited doesn't mean they didn't happen at all, or that they're unimportant.
> The wikipedia article has a long list of experiments, but the question is, "Do they actually contribute anything?"
This one is vital to our understanding of how space radiation affects embryonic development, which is critical for space colonization: https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/research/experime...
Or this one, which tested various fire suppressants in microgravity to determine their effectiveness, which is critical for manned spaceflight safety beyond merely the ISS: https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/research/experime...
Or this one, where the Michael J. Fox foundation partnered with NASA to conduct research on the ISS to replicate a key protein involved in Parkinson's disease (LRRK₂) in microgravity, allowing for much larger and more uniform growth patterns than possible on Earth: https://www.michaeljfox.org/news/parkinsons-protein-blasting...
Or this one, which evaluated the risks of microbial contamination on interplanetary missions (which could jeopardize the search for extraterrestrial microbes on e.g. Mars) by examining microbes that survived on the exterior of the ISS: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22680691/
> Can you name one scientific result from an ISS experiment? I can't.
That only goes to show your lack of willingness to educate yourself on the matter. Like, a search engine ain't exactly hard to use; I was able to pull all those examples within a couple minutes.
> Humans aren't colonizing anything in space. You've read too many scifi books.
No, I've read "too many" research papers and NASA reports. Evidently you have read none.
Humans absolutely will colonize space. Obviously not right this second, but humankind has been making baby steps toward that goal for as long as it's known of the existence and the vastness of space, and there is no reason to believe that will somehow not continue to be the case. Earth won't last forever, especially at the rate we're destroying it; permanent space colonization is therefore not just an economic and scientific boon, but absolutely imperative for the long-term survival of our species.
This is the part that's exciting for me. Whether it comes in the form of more space stations like the ISS or a much bigger and reinvigorated ISS, either way is a vital step in the right direction toward making humanity less beholden to a single planet.
Lots of challenges still to come, but this is a reminder that those challenges can someday be overcome.