NASA is preparing to destroy the International Space Station (ISS), awarding SpaceX a contract worth up to $843 million to safely push the station out of orbit and back to Earth.
According to the space agency’s plans, SpaceX’s specially designed deorbit vehicle will tow the football-field-sized ISS back to Earth sometime after its operational life ends in 2030. The ISS will crash into our planet’s atmosphere with a speed of more than 17,000 mph (27,500 km/h) before landing in a crash site in the ocean.
Deorbiting the space station “supports NASA’s plans for future commercial destinations and allows continued use of near-Earth space.” Ken BowersoxNASA’s associate administrator for the Space Operations Mission Directorate, said in a statement.
The first parts of the floating laboratory were launched in 1998, and it has been occupied by astronauts from the US, Japan, Russia, Canada and Europe since 2000, who have completed more than 3,300 scientific experiments in a narrow orbit above the Earth.
But the space station is showing its age: technical glitches and leaks continue to cause problems for crews, and contracts between the five participating national space agencies — which marked an era of global cooperation in space after the end of the Cold War — will finish. until 2030.
The ISS also faces risks from the growing problem of space debris—orbital debris made by other defunct satellites orbiting Earth at high speeds. On Thursday (June 27) nine astronauts aboard the ISS were forced to shelter in the docked Boeing Starliner crew capsule after hundreds of pieces of debris from a destroyed Russian satellite threatened the space station’s security. The crew was allowed to return to the ISS after about an hour and operations continued as normal.
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But it’s still unclear exactly when the space station will come crashing back down to Earth. The 2030 end date is in NASA’s budget, but the space agency is committed to operations throughout 2030.
“There’s nothing magical that’s going to happen in 2030,” Steve Stich, NASA’s commercial crew program manager at Johnson Space Center (JSC) in Houston, said at a Jan. 25 press conference.
The ISS will likely continue its work until the commercial space stations planned to replace it come online, Stich added. These include Axiom Space’s Axiom Station and the Orbital Reef designed by Blue Origin and Sierra Space. Both stations are scheduled to come online by the end of this decade.
When the ISS is about to be destroyed, it is also unclear how much other space agencies will shoulder the burden. NASA said in its statement that “the safe deorbit of the International Space Station is the responsibility of all five space agencies,” but the extent of their financial or technical involvement in SpaceX’s delay is unspecified.
The fiery descent of the ISS will not be the first performed by a decommissioned space station. In 2001, Russia’s Mir space station was sent crashing back to Earth, and its surviving fragments were swallowed by the Pacific Ocean.
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