international space station decommission

The ISS has enabled astronauts to experience extended stays in space while conducting science experiments in microgravity conditions. Too large to burn up during re-entry, what’s left of the facility will crash into the ocean before sinking out of sight. The station is therefore expected to be decommissioned in January 2031, with engineers performing a re-entry burn to extract it from its orbit some 250 miles above Earth. But the cost and effort of maintaining the aging structure means NASA and its counterparts will not be seeking a further extension. NASA recently announced its intention to extend ISS operations until 2030, at which point the facility will be around 30 years old. Point Nemo is a spot far from land known as “the space cemetery” as it’s commonly targeted for controlled descents of space junk.

Fitbit Versa 3Īn updated ISS Transition Report released by NASA this week outlined a plan to send the ISS plunging into the ocean at Point Nemo when it decommissions the facility in 2031. This includes using the spacecraft as an “analog for a Mars transit mission”. The money saved can “be applied to Nasa’s deep space exploration initiatives, allowing the agency to explore further and faster into deep space”.īut NASA has laid down some ambitious goals for the next decade before the ISS is finally laid to rest. This transition to renting space onboard commercial platforms could end up saving NASA $1.3 billion in 2031 alone, the space agency says.

“The private sector is technically and financially capable of developing and operating commercial low-Earth orbit destinations, with NASA’s assistance,” Phil McAlister, director of commercial space at NASA Headquarters, said in a statement. Find out what we’ll be prepping for: /FMcmj0hfenĪccording to NASA, once it retires, the ISS will be replaced by “one or more commercially-owned and -operated” space platforms. The Biden-Harris Administration has extended operations for the orbital lab until 2030. The has provided a unique opportunity for research and results for more than 20 years - that’s a lot of science! In 2014, NASA extended its tenure in space by another 10 years. Interestingly, the ISS was meant to be operated only for about 15 years.

Located about 2,700 km away from any land, it is named after a character in Jules Verne’s novel “Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. Point Nemo has grown to become a sort of space cemetery, where decommissioned space debris is often brought to rest. “ISS operators will perform the ISS re-entry burn, providing the final push to lower ISS as much as possible and ensure safe atmospheric entry,” the transition plan explains. Mission control will first lower its altitude, before the spacecraft begins its descent into the “South Pacific Oceanic Uninhabited Area (SPOUA),” in an area known as Point Nemo. Advanced water filtration and purification systems as well as successful attempts at crop production onboard the space station have also offered useful lessons for people around the world who lack access to these crucial resources.Ĭlick here for more How will the ISS retire?Īccording to NASA’s budget estimates, the ISS’ re-entry into the Earth’s atmosphere will take place in January 2031. In 2016, a NASA astronaut was able to sequence DNA in space for the first time. For instance, in 2018, NASA’s Cold Atom Lab became the first facility to produce the fifth state of matter, called a Bose-Einstein condensate, in space. Several landmark firsts were recorded onboard the ISS in the last two decades. It also houses laboratory modules from the United States, Russia, Japan and Europe. It can support a crew of six people, along with visitors. Since then, the space lab has carried over 200 astronauts and cosmonauts from about 19 different countries - marking a continuous human presence in space.Īccording to NASA, the space station weighs about a million pounds on earth and is approximately the same size as an American football field. It was on November 2, 2000, that the first crew arrived. Over the next two years, the space station was built piece by piece until it was ready to carry a crew onboard.

International space station decommission