Nagatar Karumuttu Chettiar wrote:one of more infrastructure in space for the good of everyone, and not "ooh, pretty space station".
OOC: Hence me harping about the "why" part so much. Because in Real Life it wasn't the United Nations that had ISS built (not to mention
mandating that nations spend money on building a space station), it was a voluntary coalition of nations. And I think that would indeed be a better approach for you too. Encourage nations to work together, to build or share existing space stations that are reachable to them and their neighbours, but not actually mandate it, because if a nation is unwilling to spend any money on space research, it's usually because of wanting to put money in keeping its own people safe and healthy and whatnot. If you have to choose between being able to feed everyone for a year or to send a couple of people into orbit for a month, reasonable nations would choose to feed everyone for a year.
If you really are intending the whole "scientific advancements" angle (you'll still have to justify the Educational AoE, though), then I would start from encouraging sharing of the data from microgravity experiements done by others (but be aware of the patents mess), because, like, if there are two WA nations who would both have access to the station, and one nation sends peeps up there to do the experiments - there's no
need for the other to send people there too to do the same experiments, if the first nation is willing to share all the data. Space flights are expensive for MT nations, and putting people into space and keeping them alive and bringing them back to ground alive, too, is even more expensive. Which is why you shouldn't mandate the data is shared for free, mind you. And also require that any nation wanting to use a station built by someone else, needs permission from its builders to use it, and also needs to partake the upkeep and maintenance costs.
I would
also drop all the "jumping point for more exploration" or "refueling" or whatever, because not only are those going to be unlikely functions for a scientific station (which is what ISS in RL is), the "refueling" especially is... kinda impossible, considering that you'll need to get the fuel from somewhere, and that rocket fuel is notoriously dangerous to deal with. In comparison, dousing yourself in gasoline and then dancing through a house on fire is much safer than dealing with refueling rockets in microgravity.