Yes, plenty has. Unfortunately, the cost of putting ISS into space is so large that the price of each experiment conducted so far, amortized over the cost of the station, is in the tens of millions of dollars. The real question is: what will it take to make this expensive monstrosity worth the cost?

If you already did the math, you already figured out that it will take 10,000 experiments to make the per-experiment cost only $10 million. Does that make it worth the cost?

President Bill Clinton might say that it is already worth the cost, because it kept rocket technology from falling into hostile hands after the Russians partnered with us. But that partnership only added to the cost of the station, and rockets have fallen into the hands of hostile nations anyway. If it hadn’t been a boondoggle before, it certainly became one at that time.

Oh, and because Clinton added to the cost of the station, cost-saving decisions were made to reduce the scientific usefulness of the station and reduce the maximum crew. Because a fixed number of man-hours are needed for station operations and maintenance, the result is far less available astronaut time to perform experiments, and so a reduction in the number of experiments performed.

Although it is useful, it probably will never become cost effective.

I don’t know what these stupid politicians are thinking, when they willy nilly muck with expensive space hardware and carefully thought out plans. Hopefully the National Space Council will prevent this kind of thoughtless mucking around, and hopefully commercial space will start to use space efficiently and effectively.

That interfax link isn’t working for me, but here is a cached version of the story: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:kZT84zY_EH0J:www.interfax.com/newsinf.asp%3Fy%3D2017%26m%3D10%26d%3D25%26id%3D786392+&cd=3&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us