What is the purpose of the international space station other than wasting money?
It provides humanity (as a whole) a first step into space. The moon may be reachable by present space craft, however it would be colonizable if we had a working space platform in earth orbit. Mars may be relatively easy to reach today without the space station, however to send men and women to mars will require that we have a habitable station in orbit in which to house the construction workers who will assemble the Mars crafts in orbit. The space platform is presently being used for research, many micro-g experiments are taking place, many are planned in future. There are drugs and materials that can only be produced in micro-g conditions – serious research is being done in the ISS to make mass productions of these possible in future. Aside from the science and transportation part of it, there is the simple fact that this is an international cooperative effort here. For humanity to reach out to touch the stars we will have to be a unified species, not just individual nations. Like it
