The International Space Station will operate for an additional four years, or until 2024, the U.S. space agency said on Wednesday.
After being operational for 15 years, the $100 billion orbiting outpost was expected to remain open to global collaborators until 2020, Agence France-Presse reported.
"This is a tremendous announcement for us here in the space station world," said William Gerstenmaier, associate administrator for NASA's Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate.
The space station, which has more living space than a six-bedroom house and comes complete with Internet access, a gym, two bathrooms and a host of science experiments has more than a dozen countries which participate in it.
According to AFP, NASA said the entire lab is the length of a football field (357 feet, 109 meters). Some four times bigger than the Russian space station Mir and about five times as large as the U.S. Skylab, the International Space Station is the largest space lab to have ever been built.
Although it's near weightless in space, the space station has a mass of 924,739 pounds. It's maintained by a rotating crew of six astronauts and cosmonauts from the U.S., Russia, Europe, Canada and Japan, AFP reported.
"People love the International Space Station," said David Weaver, NASA's associate administrator for the Office of Communications.
According to Weaver, this is the second time that President Obama has extended the life of the station under his administration.
"We need a longer planning horizon than we currently have," he said.
Gerstenmaier said the decision to extend goes until "at least 2024," and noted "the hardware can last to 2028."
"I think the idea is that 10 years from today is a pretty far-reaching, pretty strategic decision," he said. "We have talked to the partners about this. They were involved in all the hardware studies. In general, they see this as a positive step moving forward."
From the U.S. perspective, the decision would not require any immediate funds, since the budget has already allowed for ISS activity through 2020, Gerstenmaier said.
Humans gain access to the lab by launching three at a time aboard Russian Soyuz spacecraft, according to AFP.
The Americans' ability to reach the lab ended in 2011 with the retirement of the 30-year space shuttle program. However, U.S. companies SpaceX and Orbital Sciences have succeeded in sending unmanned cargo capsules to the outpost, and new U.S. crew ships are expected to launch in 2017.
The aging structure requires regular maintenance, which is done by astronauts who don spacesuits and venture outside the lab, AFP reported. The last such repair was completed on Christmas Eve when two Americans stepped out to replace a failed ammonia pump that served to cool equipment at the ISS.
Further details about the decision were expected from the White House and NASA administrator Charles Bolden later in the day, Gerstenmaier told reporters.
