It's pretty wild to me that in both the article (written by Eric Berger, who really knows his stuff and did two fantastic books on the history of SpaceX and the rise of new space) and the first 31 comments made here on HN as I write this that a Find for one word has zero results: "starship". That's the overwhelming behemoth elephant in the room. For the purposes of launching/building a space station, it doesn't matter if Starship can't reenter, or refueling doesn't work or any of the other hard problems. It just needs to get to orbit. Which it has proven it can. And that means that any space station developed using anything before that will be rapidly completely obsolete from a commercial perspective. Starship will just offer so much more volume and mass for the same cost or less. NASA may want very hard to hit their 2030 deadline, but the technology may simply not line up to do it on the budget they want and desired partner concerns, same as how the retirement of the Space Shuttle didn't line up with American private launch (though of course in the end that has made it and been a big win). No company that actually wants to make money is going to risk billions on something that somebody else can lap them on by an order of magnitude in a few years or less.

I suspect that of "continuous presence in low orbit", "longer term new capabilities", "in budget", and "commercially successful" NASA is going to be forced to pick one or two and that's what they're resisting. Rushing things along almost always costs a lot of money and features. If you want to hit a budget and features then you have to be willing to wait for the various bits to line up and preferably spend some time experimenting and exploring new capabilities and strategies before big hardware commitments. There's a lot of moving parts here to think through. This would all be true even if that was NASA's only concern, vs going to the Moon and all the normal and importance science and so on they're getting pushed on.

I think even experts like Eric are now being conservative on Starship because the program is genuinely in a tough spot.

For most satellites/space stations, you need a proper payload deployment mechanism. The pez dispenser mechanism was chosen because opening the entire payload bay and closing it back up for reentry is a tough problem. For now it has been put aside to focus on the goals for Artemis, but that also means not being able to launch stuff other than Starlink.

Starship is currently still stuck in development hell, Musk is already backing off from his Mars plans, SpaceX is moving to distractions and going public (something they previously claimed would not be done).

To me, these moves do not suggest confidence in Starship's ability to live up to its advertised capabilities.

The Starship is also built to house astronauts for longish trips. It’s not a stretch to think of it as a larger Skylab station. If the can figure out how to attach six or eight of them in a ring with bridges and spin, they could have the artificial gravity station that’s been the stuff of science fiction (and the movie The Martian)

Just a few days ago, NASA unveiled its plan to establish a permanent base on the Moon: https://www.nasa.gov/ignition/

NASA finally got a leader with a clear vision, and with technologies like Starship and Blue Origin's New Glenn getting ready, the future is bright!

ISS is no longer the frontier, and I am glad NASA is focusing its resources on the future.

I don't think Starship has gotten to orbit yet. It's gotten to altitude but not speed. That's a very big deal, because slowing down from that speed is a massive challenge unto itself.

Orbit is scheduled for the test after next, if all goes well.

They don't really need Starship just for orbit. They've already got ships that get to the ISS and back. They really do need to get Starship to orbit or their plans really will be hosed.

By that logic, was ISS obsoleted by Skylab?