NASA Still Training Astronaut Candidates for International Space Station

The 24th class of astronaut candidates will graduate in 2027. The space station is set to be retired in 2030.

NASA’s 24th class of astronaut candidates pose around a sculpture of the NASA “worm” logo at Johnson Space Center in Houston before being announced to the nation on Sept. 22, 2025. (Courtesy of NASA).

Astronaut candidate Ben Bailey was coming up on five months into his training when he spoke with The Epoch Times on Jan. 30.

The seasoned test pilot was one of 10 men and women NASA introduced to the world in September 2025 as its 24th astronaut candidate class. Their two years of candidate training began at an ambitious time for the space program. Artemis II is set to fly humans back to the moon, and then-acting NASA Administrator Sean Duffy teased at their reveal that one of them could be the first American to set foot on Mars.

But Bailey told The Epoch Times that his training has also been preparing him for the International Space Station (ISS), signaling how far NASA is going to get the most out of its proven orbital outpost.

“I think that there’s a potential that all of us could wind up there,” he said.

Bailey and his classmates will finish their training in 2027. The ISS is scheduled to be taken out of orbit to burn up in the atmosphere in 2030. But he is not ruling out the possibility that NASA pushes that deorbit deadline back. He has already started learning Russian and was about to begin spacewalk training on a mock-up of the station in a neutral buoyancy lab.

“The ISS, you know, is scheduled for deorbit in 2030. That could be 2030, or it could get pushed back,“ he said. ”All sorts of decisions are still being made, and so ultimately, the decision whether or not we were going to learn Russian or prep for ISS missions came down to the fact that we want to prepare everybody for everything.”

Bailey’s comments come shortly after a press conference in which NASA leaders reaffirmed their commitment to get the most out of the space station as possible.

Dina Contella, deputy ISS program manager, said that a specially designed SpaceX Cargo Dragon was used to successfully lift the Space Station into the highest orbit it has ever flown, a little more than 260 miles above the Earth. Orbital boosts such as this are necessary to keep the space station in orbit.

Ken Bowersox, associate administrator for NASA’s space operations mission directorate, estimated that NASA would send another eight to 10 missions to the ISS before its scheduled retirement, including possibly as many as three aboard the Boeing Starliner pending an upcoming unmanned cargo mission.

He also said that the number of crewed missions could increase because of the addition of private missions and “other individual short missions.”

Later that same night, NASA announced that private space company Axiom would fly its fifth private mission to the ISS no earlier than January 2027. The four-person crew will stay aboard the station for 14 days. NASA and its international partners will get to review and approve the proposed crew.

“The International Space Station is a critical platform for enabling commercial industry in low Earth orbit,” Dana Weigel, ISS program manager at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, said in a statement. “Private astronaut missions allow the station to be used as a proving ground for new markets and technologies while enabling science, research, and outreach to contribute to a growing space economy.”

As for NASA’s own astronauts, Bowersox affirmed that funding remained strong enough to maintain as many as four Americans at the space station.

“Based on the most recent appropriation and the supplemental appropriation that we received before that, we think we’re going to be able to maintain four crew on ISS,” he said. “And we’re always evaluating mission length and the activities that we do aboard ISS to make sure that we match with the resources we have available.”