re: thanks Greg, Chris, & Tom
I guess he has a point, which is to use this time to thrash out all the options instead of letting bureaucratic inertia pick a bad plan.
One question they should ask themselves is if someone gave you the ISS as it is for free, what would you do with it? Would you add to it, consider it a white elephant and junk it, send it to Mars, etc. The work done on the ISS so far means the easiest way is to just keep adding to it. If they just gave up now and started with a fresh slate they might be better off. Maybe they could put it in orbit around the Moon and use it as a base to colonise the Moon.