A look at NASA’s future plans with and without the ISS

With the retirement of the Space Shuttle program, the most popular one that NASA is best known for now is it’s role in the International Space Station. Astronauts have lived and worked onboard the ISS orbiting roughly 250 miles above the Earth’s surface for more than 20 years. It has a planned retirement of 2024 but it’s likely to go a few years longer than that. However to get ready for that day, NASA has committed to replacing the ISS with one or more commercially owned and operated space destinations. The agency’s inspector general wanted to take a look at how much both options would cost, and what NASA would need to do in the meantime to get ready. For a look at what the IG found, I spoke with Rachel Pierre, who is a management analyst for the OIG.