The world will be watching—literally—as SpaceX tackles possibly what might be its highest-stakes endeavor to date: safely destroying the beloved International Space Station
SpaceX has won the right to tackle a monumental task: destroying the International Space Station (ISS). The demolition will shove the iconic and enormous station down through Earth’s atmosphere in a fiery display. And if anything goes wrong, a cascade of debris could rain down on our planet’s surface.
Conceived and built in a post-cold-war partnership with Russia, the ISS, like so many of NASA’s major projects, has lasted far longer than its initial design life of 15 years. Nothing lasts forever, however, especially in the harsh environment of outer space. The ISS is aging, and for safety’s sake, NASA intends to incinerate the immense facility around 2031. To accomplish the job, the agency will pay SpaceX up to $843 million, according to a statement released on June 26. The contract covers the development of a unique deorbit vehicle to usher the unwieldy ISS to its doom yet excludes launch costs.
NASA has declined to provide the number of proposals received for the projects. Currently, no details about SpaceX’s vision for the deorbit vehicle are publicly known. Scientific American reached out to the company but did not receive a response by publication.On supporting science journalism
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What’s clear is that SpaceX’s existing Dragon and Starship spacecraft aren’t good matches for the deorbit mission. That means the company could intend to heavily adapt one of these vehicles or to start from scratch and design a custom-built craft.
Whatever the deorbit vehicle ends up looking like, SpaceX is taking on a delicate technical challenge. The ISS is perhaps the most complex construction project ever executed—and certainly the largest and most expensive one in space. Beginning in 1998 its modules required 42 different launches to blast off Earth. And the orbiting laboratory contains about as much internal space as a six-bedroom house spread over an area the size of a football field. Weighing more than 450 tons, or the equivalent of nearly three large blue whales, the ISS is heavy, too. Safely destroying the space station arguably will be even harder than assembling it.
The ISS should still have several years of science ahead. NASA has said it intends to operate the space station through 2030 and that its partner space agencies in Canada, Europe and Japan concur with that time line. Russia’s Roscosmos, which leads the ISS partnership with NASA and operates several key modules of the station, is currently only committed through at least 2028.
But why destroy the station at all? Because of the ISS’s lengthy and continuous tenure, the last time Earth orbit was bereft of human beings was in November 2000, just before the arrival of Expedition 1, when a NASA astronaut and two Russian cosmonauts began the station’s first residency.
