The International Space Station—larger than a football field and weighing almost 450 tons—must eventually fall to Earth. It’s a delicate, dangerous process
For nearly a quarter century, the International Space Station (ISS) has continuously hosted astronauts and science experiments as an enduring and beloved bastion of humanity in low-Earth orbit. Yet despite its successes, the space station’s days are numbered.
In the coming months, NASA will be evaluating commercial proposals for vehicles capable of “decommissioning” the ISS—that is, of safely dropping it into Earth’s atmosphere to burn up. The agency has said it expects to pay nearly $1 billion for this service to avoid relying on multiple Russian vehicles. The brutal ending is scheduled for early next decade but is already proving a delicate matter for aerospace engineering and international diplomacy.
The ISS is “a key symbol of international and civilian cooperation,” says Mai’a Cross, a political scientist at Northeastern University. “In terms of civilian cooperation, I think many would describe it as the biggest project ever embarked upon in human history.”
Although it is also supported by Canada, Japan and Europe, the ISS is chiefly a creation of the U.S. and Russia and is one of the very few areas of steadfast cooperation between both nations across decades of rocky relations. Its first modules—one from the U.S., and the other from Russia—reached orbit in late 1998. And the space station’s first crew—one astronaut and two cosmonauts—took up residence in November 2000. The ISS has been constantly inhabited ever since and has far surpassed its original target lifetime of 15 years.
But nothing lasts forever. “Although you hate to see it go, and it’ll be sad when it’s retired, it’s really not practical to keep it on orbit indefinitely,” says George Nield, president of the company Commercial Space Technologies and a former member of NASA’s Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel, a long-standing committee that has urged the space agency to develop a clear strategy for the ISS’s demise sooner rather than later.
A LOOMING PROBLEM
The laboratory’s doom comes from its location in low-Earth orbit, within the tenuous upper reaches of Earth’s atmosphere. There, whatever goes up must come down, pulled back to our planet by a steady wash of speed-sapping atmospheric particles.
