"The station itself can be flown uncrewed from Mission Control," Gerstenmaier said.

Of course, NASA and its international partners would much prefer to keep the orbiting lab fully staffed. Crew members on board can fix maintenance or servicing issues that crop up, for example, which can't be done from the ground.

And with more crew members aboard the station, more scientific research can get done. On a fully de-staffed station, some experiments could go on as before, such as the recently installed $2 billion Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, which is hunting dark matter, antimatter and cosmic rays.

But many other projects would have to be dropped, or at least postponed, without astronauts on board to conduct them. And NASA hopes it doesn't come to that, officials have said.

"If the ISS needed to be de-crewed, the largest impact would obviously be to crew-tended research," Gerstenmaier said.

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3 Comments

1. 1. Quinn the Eskimo 03:52 PM 10/15/11

   NASA's problem, as of now, it that they have no where to go.
   
   LEO is a waste land.
   
   The Moon is a dream.
   
   Mars is science fiction.
   
   The box NASA is in is of its own making. Now they have to live in it.
   
   
   
   .

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2. 2. Mark Heinemann 03:42 PM 10/19/11

   Space travel is man's future, but our leaders are only interested in tax cuts for the rich. If they win, America will become a third world nation.

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3. 3. bucketofsquid 11:38 AM 10/28/11

   The original idea for the ISS was to gather knowledge needed to be able to plant a base on the moon and start the slow process of outward expansion. LEO is not a wasteland because of GPS and telecom. The moon has mineral resources and microgravity fabrication potential. Mars is not science fiction because we have planted equipment there.
   
   Mars would have to be extensively terraformed to be truely habitable but fully enclosed subterranean colonies may be possible in the short term depending on the presence of exploitable minerals and the ability of plants to grow in an artificial environment.

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