In response to a post about John Glenn’s vague boostering of the ISS, there’s an interesting discussion in comments over at Space Politics about its utility.

I agree with “anonymous” that orbital assembly techniques are crucial skills, and disagree with Donald Robertson that the ISS was a good or cost-effective (or even necessary) way to get them. Like Shuttle, to the degree we’ve learned things from ISS, it was much more how not to do things, and the cost of the education was far too high.