An Excruciatingly Detailed

Breakdown of How NASA

Plans to Destroy the ISS
After its retirement in 2030, the nearly one-million-pound space station will
become—by far—the largest object ever brought back from space. Here's
how NASA plans to do it safely.

By Passant Rabie
Updated July 8, 2024 | Comments (17)

The International Space Station (ISS) is counting its days, with a retirement
looming over the orbital lab in just a few years’ time. For more than 20 years,
the space station has served as home for astronauts in low Earth orbit, but it
will soon meet its demise as it plunges through the atmosphere to leave
behind tiny fragments of an iconic legacy.

NASA is cooking up a plan to deorbit its beloved space station in 2030,

sending it flying through Earth’s atmosphere where most of it will burn up
from the heat of reentry. The space agency, along with its international
partners, has looked over several different options and narrowed it down
based on feasibility and cost. After a years-long effort, NASA decided to call on
the private industry to design a spacecraft that will drag the space station
towards its fiery death.

The ISS is a big boy, holding the record for the largest human-made structure
in space. It stretches 357 feet long (109 meters)—about as large as a football
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 field—and will be the largest object to ever be deorbited. Bringing down the
ISS won’t be easy, and making sure its remaining parts land far away from
inhabited areas is the key challenge. Here’s a breakdown of how NASA and its
partners plan to bring the storied space station down to its final resting place.

Why is NASA ditching the ISS?

NASA and its partners began assembling the space station in 1998. The ISS
has served as a pivotal platform for scientific research and new tech
demonstrations in microgravity that have often been used on Earth. The space
station symbolizes international cooperation and peace, showcasing
collaboration among the space agencies of the U.S., Russia, Europe, Japan,
and Canada. It has hosted hundreds of astronauts from 18 different countries,
who have completed over 270 spacewalks.
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 NASA

Alas, all good things must come to an end. The ISS is getting old and the wear
and tear of being in space has taken its toll. Significantly, its retirement will
make way for the commercial utilization of low Earth orbit, with private
companies designing their own space stations to take over once the ISS is
gone.

Russia has agreed to continue deploying its cosmonauts to the ISS until 2028
as it constructs its own space station in orbit. Since its inception, the ISS has
continuously hosted at least one NASA astronaut and one Roscosmos
cosmonaut. Over the years, Russian Soyuz and Progress vehicles have
conducted numerous crew and cargo missions to the ISS. The Russian space
agency will likely take these toys with them when it leaves, meaning NASA will
be without its key ISS partner for the decommissioning task.

The space station will have to be destroyed, as disassembling it is simply not

practical. “The station was never designed to be taken apart again,” Marco
Langbroek, an astrodynamics lecturer at Delft Technical University in the
Netherlands, told Gizmodo in an email. “I think the current plan is the only
option available.”

The space station’s initial assembly took 27 missions using NASA’s now-
retired Space Shuttle. Taking apart the ISS bit by bit would require extensive
amounts of effort by NASA, international space agencies, and their astronauts,
in addition to having a spacecraft large enough to return those parts to Earth.

“Any disassembly effort to safely disconnect and return individual

components (such as modules) would face significant logistical and financial
challenges, requiring at least an equivalent number of [spacewalks] by space
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 station crew, extensive planning by ground support personnel, and a
spacecraft with a capability similar to the space shuttle’s large cargo bay,
which does not currently exist,” NASA wrote in a recent report.

The space agency added that it is in the process of developing a preservation

plan for some smaller items from the ISS. This makes a lot of sense; the
station is filled with mementos and artifacts worth preserving.

The path to destruction

Rather than letting the space station tumble its way towards Earth in an
uncontrolled reentry, NASA and its partners will have to target a remote
uninhabited area in the ocean as a landing point for any remaining debris. The
orbital debris mitigation standard practice accepts a human casualty risk of
less than 1 in 10,000.

Before the process of deorbiting takes place, the ISS will be emptied out of all
movable goods that can be transported back to Earth. ISS astronauts will also
have to evacuate the space station before its deorbit, leaving the orbiting lab
empty for the first time in decades. Someone—we obviously don’t know who—
will be the last astronaut to float within its cozy confines.

A controlled reentry always begins with lowering a spacecraft’s orbit. The first
step to reentry will be to cancel the periodic orbit raising burns that maintain
the lab’s position some 250 miles (400 kilometers) above sea level.
Eventually, the station’s orbit will decay to below 150 miles (250 kilometers),
according to Langbroek. This natural orbital decay, caused by atmospheric
drag, will likely take months to gradually bring the ISS down, he explained.
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 The SpaceX factor

For the next step, the space agency has tasked SpaceX with designing a new
deorbit vehicle. This vehicle will dock with the ISS and perform a series of
deorbit burns to further lower the space station’s orbit (NASA had previously
suggested using Russia’s Progress cargo spacecraft to deorbit the ISS, but
that’s now off the table). In March, the space agency released its 2024 budget
proposal, which included $180 million for developing a deorbit capability for
the ISS by the end of 2030. At the time, NASA had estimated its ISS tug would
cost around $1 billion in total.

The recently awarded SpaceX contract is worth $843 million, which will cover
the development of the vehicle but does not include the cost of launching it.
The company hasn’t shared details of its space tug design, and it’s not clear
whether it could repurpose its Dragon spacecraft or build a different one
altogether. The exorbitantly priced tug is a one-time use spacecraft and will
not survive the deorbit assignment. While SpaceX “will develop the deorbit
spacecraft, NASA will take ownership after development and operate it
throughout its mission,” NASA wrote. “Along with the space station, it is
expected to destructively breakup as part of the re-entry process.”

Safe and controlled reentry

With the help of its brand new tug, the ISS will need to execute a large reentry
burn to precisely target its reentry location. This will ensure a controlled
descent through the atmosphere to manage its debris footprint. The thrust
maneuver has to be strong enough to bring the spacecraft into an elliptical
orbit, or an oval-shaped path, so that it’s properly captured by the
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 atmosphere, according to Tobias Lips, managing director of satellite
aerodynamics company Hyperschall Technologie Göttingen in Germany.

“If you have a maneuver which is strong enough to bring your perigee
[minimum altitude] basically down to zero, then the uncertainties of the
distribution of your fragments on the ground play a smaller role,” Lips told
Gizmodo. “If you are accepting a higher perigee altitude, then the potential
splashdown zone, which includes all uncertainties, becomes larger and
larger.”

The reentry expert estimates that around 40% of the ISS will survive its
heated journey through the atmosphere, but that NASA will have sufficient
control over the splashdown zone. While a significant amount of material
could fall from space, it likely won’t land near inhabited areas.

Destruction of an icon

The ISS will slam into the atmosphere at speeds reaching 17,500 miles per
hour (28,000 kilometer per hour). Once the space station descends to an
altitude below 60 miles (100 kilometers), it will start to fall apart, according to
Langbroek. During its fatal nosedive, the famous structure will start to distort,
its familiar outline will begin disintegrating piece by piece, with the metal
bending under the pressure.

“External elements like solar panels and antennae will probably break off first,
then the main structure of the station will break up into fragments,”
Langbroek said. “Most of those will burn up but some significant more dense
and massive parts, like docking ports and parts of the truss structure, will
likely survive.”
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 The parts of the ISS that survive reentry are likely to constitute 10% to 20% of
its total mass. That’s over 180,000 pounds (81,646 kilograms) worth of
material, which is why a controlled reentry is key. This might seem obvious,
but the smaller the spacecraft, the fewer fragments survive reentry. As Lips
explained, smaller objects heat up more intensely and are more likely to
disintegrate upon reentry due to their compact size, whereas larger objects are
less prone to complete breakdown, making it hard for them to fully
disintegrate.

The remaining ISS fragments will splash down in an empty area of the
southern Pacific Ocean known as the spacecraft cemetery, with plenty of dead
satellites buried at the bottom (including Russia’s Mir space station, which
crashed to Earth in 2001). The remote region of the Pacific Ocean, called
Point Nemo, lies between New Zealand and South America and it is the
farthest place from dry land.

Related article: Skylab, the First U.S. Space Station, Changed What We Thought Was
Possible in Orbit

In 1979, the first U.S. space station Skylab decayed and disintegrated into
Earth’s atmosphere, scattering debris across the Indian Ocean and Western
Australia. NASA calculated there was a 1 in 152 chance of the remaining
fragments hitting people on the ground. Thankfully, there were no reported
injuries.

It’s hard to think of the beloved ISS broken up into pieces and trashed in the
Pacific Ocean, but its legacy will far outlast its burnt up fragments. The
destruction of the space station signals the end of an era, and marks the
beginning of a new one that leans more into the commercialization of space.
With this new era, Earth’s orbit is set to undergo significant changes.
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 Correction: A previous version of this article gave the incorrect year for
Skylab’s reentry; it was in 1979, not 1973.

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