NASA is planning to deorbit the International Space Station (ISS), awarding SpaceX a contract worth up to $843 million to safely bring the station back to Earth. The deorbit operation will occur after the ISS completes its operational life in 2030. SpaceX will use a specially designed vehicle to drag the ISS, which is the size of a football field, into Earth’s atmosphere at over 17,000 mph (27,500 km/h) before it crashes into the ocean.
This operation supports NASA’s future commercial space plans and ensures the continued use of near-Earth space, according to Ken Bowersox, NASA’s associate administrator for Space Operations Mission Directorate. The ISS, launched in parts starting in 1998, has been a hub for international scientific collaboration since 2000, hosting astronauts from the U.S., Japan, Russia, Canada, and Europe and facilitating over 3,300 experiments.
However, the ISS is aging, with increasing technical faults and leaks, and the current international agreements governing it will expire by 2030. The space station also faces growing threats from space debris. Recently, nine ISS astronauts had to seek shelter from debris from a shattered Russian satellite.
While the deorbit timeline is tied to NASA’s 2030 budget, the exact date remains flexible. Steve Stich, manager of NASA’s commercial crew program, noted that operations might continue until new commercial space stations, like Axiom Space’s Axiom Station and Blue Origin and Sierra Space’s Orbital Reef, are operational.
The details of how much other space agencies will contribute to the deorbit effort remain unclear. NASA has stated that the safe deorbit of the ISS is a shared responsibility among all five participating space agencies. This will not be the first time a space station has been deorbited; Russia’s Mir space station was decommissioned in 2001, with its remnants falling into the Pacific Ocean.
