Trust me; this is certainly not another bogus ruse nor a joke, unless you consider being snookered by those "having the right stuff" as a joke. Though perhaps it's actually a sort of sick joke counter offensive, somewhat like my being personally offended by how our incompetent smirking administration (I'm wondering if our resident warlord has actually taken my suggestion of having those Botoxin injections in order to get rid of his silly smirk) has taken so many hard working Americans to the financial cleaners (some to their graves, many if you would care to include 9/11), while the good news is that they managed to long-term neglect the sorts of blatant dishonesty among so many politically friendly corporations and, of allowing subsequent pent up frustrations that emerged from such blatant arrogance and sheer greed by those same US firms (many still closely associated with the current administration), as subsequently blindly leading us into the likes of 9/11 (I'm not certain you and I can survive another round of such good news).
By The Freaking Way; as for getting ISS underway, that part seems doable, especially since it's already at 3/4 escape velocity. So, by having that benefit along with adding the sorts of nuclear powered EMP type of propulsion (ISP of 4500) certainly ott to provide nearly all that's needed, except for having a few alternatives such as arrays of SRBs or of some other conventional liquid fueled rockets for added breaking.
Obviously ISS needs to incorporate another substantial layer of shielding, as well as attaching modules of mission resources and provisions (tonnes of beer, vodka, pizza and of at least another hundred tonnes of O2). The page build that's mostly related to radiation is clearly suggesting that you simply can't have too much of such a good thing as shielding.
BTFW; Since I've already suggested upon a couple of butt saving methods, such as creating personal pod coffins as providing 100 g/cm2 shields as well as for the option of simply doing a robotic transport through the Van Allen zone of death and, subsequently re-boarding prior to the reaching the gravity null such as Earth L2, L4 or L5, plus I've greatly improved upon a selection of propulsion (EMP) usage that'll not tear your precious ISS to shreds. I do not foresee relay supply missions as those beyond our current capabilities, at least Russia seems to knows how to accomplish such things (perhaps they'll teach us, or simply accomplish that portion of the mission requirements).
The real problem seems to be far more of political fally that's more worthy of NASA's "spin" and "damage control" in covering up decades worth of hidden agendas and of their cloaking on behalf of NSA/DoD that's at stake and, not so much of the actual capability of ISS nor of what it'll take, in one way or another of doing this Venus L2 thing.
Countless times I'm proposed the TRACE-II sort of mission, where that degree of proven instrument having been outfitted with the necessary configuration of efficient solid state communications lasers and of arrays of equally more so energy efficient detectors but, this too is oddly opposed by the collective. Even though the TRACE-II concept is a fraction of any Mars satellite investment and, a meager lesser or minimal fraction of a percent of moving ISS to Vl2, as well as representing nearly a zero cost factor as far as ground support, as the existing TRACE infrastructure could take over navigating and stationkeeping functions, as otherwise the vast communities of amateur astronomy or SETI would gladly do all the rest of the work, and for pennies on the dollar as compared to anything NASA.
The reason why I've focused or fixated somewhat upon a TRACE-II formula, that's because the ongoing solar monitoring functions, of what's to be seen from VL2, as beyond the globe of Venus itself is still of a worthy consideration, even though we're roughly 90% shielded by Venus, there's still loads of great solar imaging (especially of the exposed coronal photosphere and chromosphere, where resulting studies of the sun could be accomplish (perhaps even better than from Earth orbit), while simultaneously and quite efficiently performing interplanetary communications relay functions.
Of course, any village idiot fool should know, we don't even have to do a VL2 robotic satellite mission, as to take fullest advantage of the up coming window of opportunity (at least offering +/- 2 months worth) associated with the near juncture of the Earth/Venus orbits is well within what a direct planet to planet effort can mount, as for now we're not even talking about a percent of a percent (1/10,000) the cost of our doing even a basic TRACE-II satellite. Good grief folks, amateurs could devise sufficient laser transmitters and certainly there's no lack of capable soles able to affordably monitor for whatever return packets.
The only sorts of opposition to this effort is of what's been orchestrated as an undertow by NASA/NSA/DoD, as well as by those benefiting by association to their pagan god of benefits, grants and of holding great prestige and power over others, and all of that's for damn good reasons, such as all of their butts are on the line. Well folks, that's too damn bad, as I offered this more than two and a half years ago and, NASA as well as others elected to brush this one aside (they knew exactly what they were doing), hoping that I'd grow old and die if not kindly expedited along by some of that friendly fire (perhaps they thought I was onboard flight-800), or more likely being run over by that locomotive from hell that out of nowhere managed to an take out an entire family of the original Apollo safety engineer(oddly one day prior to his testifying before those charged with continued funding, as you might not recall that the early years of Apollo is where a lack of progress was far from good news and, there were mounting doubts that we could even pull this Apollo thing off, of which many today think we didn't).