I didn't consider it to be a serious article, more "fantasy thinking" on an afternoon.<p>If the operational lifetime of the ISS could somehow be extended (just keeping all the seals, metals, circuits, and infrastructure _stable_ in the vacuum/radiation/harsh-conditions-of-space will be a challenge - forget about _accelerating_ the thing out of Earth Orbit) then I've always thought that at the very least, using the ISS as a possible escape location should problems pop up during Mars-Mission vehicle construction would be great.  You then run into problems of trying to construct a device in the same relative orbit as the ISS, but _that_ is a solvable problem.