White House extends ISS operations by four years

The $100 billion-plus International Space Station (ISS) is set to have its operations extended by four more years. NASA plans to announce this week that the White House has approved the station’s operations to continue until 2024, according to documents obtained by the Orlando Sentinel.

The United States is extending the International Space Station’s operations for an additional four years until at least 2024. President Barack Obama’s administration announced on Wednesday that it approved the extension, and encouraged other countries to take similar action. “The ISS is the most complex and challenging engineering endeavor in history,” according to a White House statement written by John P. Holdren, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and Charles Bolden, a NASA administrator. “The key to its success has been the combination of NASA ingenuity and international cooperation.”