ESA Formally Agrees to Continue ISS Through 2020

The European Space Agency (ESA) has formally agreed to extending International Space Station (ISS) operations through at least 2020. Russia and Japan already had agreed to the extension in response to President Obama’s decision last year to keep the facility operating past 2015, the end date established by the George W. Bush Administration.

The ISS partnership includes the United States, Russia, ESA, Japan and Canada. President Obama’s decision thus was only the first step in getting agreement from the partnership as a whole. The Canadian Space Agency is still “working with its government to reach consensus” about continuing the ISS, according to NASA’s press release.

President Bush had planned to terminate ISS operations in 2015 in order to focus the U.S. human spaceflight program on returning astronauts to the Moon by 2020. That program, Constellation, is being terminated by the Obama Administration, which views ISS as the future of the U.S. human spaceflight program for the rest of this decade at least. President Obama announced a goal of sending astronauts to an asteroid by 2025, not to the Moon, last year.