NASA has revealed what the end of the now old and familiar International Space Station will look like.

Since November 2000, humans have been continuously in space on board the International Space Station (ISS). That will remain the case for the next nine years, but after that it is really the end of the exercise. In a recent report NASA has announced how the US space agency plans to decommission the space station in 2030 and 2031. No mean feat, because we’re talking about a 400-ton colossus. The ISS is by far the heaviest object ever to orbit the Earth.

spaceship graveyard

The operation will begin in 2030, according to the NASA report, when three unmanned cargo spacecraft will take the ISS to lower Earth orbit. Current plans assume that Russian Progress spacecraft will take on that task. But possibly the Cygnus freighters of the company Northrop Grumman Space Systems also help get the station down.

Then the rockets of the ISS itself will provide the final push, with which the station will enter the Earth’s atmosphere. For small spaceships, that would mean the end. They would disintegrate or even explode due to friction and heat. But the ISS is too big for that.

Instead, the remains of the space station are directed to the “spaceship graveyard” Point Nemo, in the Pacific Ocean. That is it most distant piece of ocean on Earth: the nearest coast is more than 2700 kilometers away. Hundreds of previous satellites and space stations have therefore been dumped. So the discarded ISS will not have to feel lonely there.

Commercial Space Stations

By giving up the ISS, NASA will save a lot of money, according to the report: between 1.1 billion and 1.6 billion euros per year. With this, the space organizations hope to pay for the moon program Artemis and other space missions.

Incidentally, NASA is not saying goodbye to the space stations entirely. If all goes well, there are stations of commercial parties in the early 1930s that the Americans can use. That is also one of the reasons that the ISS is kept ‘in the air’ for so long: so that there is no gap between the ISS and these commercial stations.

All in all, the ISS will have a pretty impressive total lifespan of about thirty years. Not bad, when you consider that the station was once designed for only half as long a stay in space.