![]() ![]() The agency had planned to give the station a boost using an early flight of the space shuttle. That's because just a few years earlier, in 1979, NASA's Skylab station fell out of orbit. (Image credit: NASA)Īlthough the afterlives of spacecraft weren't much of a concern when the International Space Station was being designed, its eventual demise didn't go completely unconsidered. Delays to the shuttle's launch meant the station fell out of orbit before a shuttle ever flew. The peril of letting the International Space Station die naturallyĪn image showing NASA's proposed space shuttle mission to boost Skylab. In a document (opens in new tab) produced in January 2022 outlining procedures for transiting from the International Space Station to its desired commercial successors, NASA outlined a "nominal scenario" for the station, in which it is carefully lowered through the atmosphere by the end of 2030. 20 YEARS DOWN AND FOREVER TO GO HOW TO"Until then it was like, 'La la la, it's in orbit, we're still building it, we're not going to worry about how to get rid of it.' Which maybe isn't quite the way you should do things." "'Oh, we'll bring it down eventually,' the idea has always been 'We commit to deorbiting it.' But my sense is that they didn't actually think through the details until about five years ago," McDowell said. The eventual fate of the space station has always been a specter for NASA and Roscosmos, Russia's federal space agency, but as time has passed, it has loomed larger on the minds of space experts. ![]() ![]() NASA has already committed to keeping the station in orbit until 2030, although its partner agencies have not signed on quite yet. When will the International Space Station end?īecause of the station's international nature - it's a partnership among the United States, Russia, Canada, Japan and the participating nations of the European Space Agency - the decision to retire it will always be based on both engineering and politics. If those fuel deliveries stop, the space station will be at the mercy of the Earth's gravity and atmosphere. "They have to have propellant to do the rendezvous, and then they can sometimes have extra to do a reboost." "Basically, any cargo ship that comes to the space station, or indeed any ferry ship, usually has surplus propellant to a certain degree," Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at Harvard who specializes in tracking objects in and falling out of orbit, told. ![]()
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