NASA Will Pay SpaceX Up to $843 Million to Destroy the International Space Station

When the International Space Station (ISS) is finally retired at the end of 2030, the nearly one-million-pound vessel won’t be left to drift aimlessly in its orbit 250 miles above the ground. Instead, NASA will pay SpaceX to destroy it.

Last week, the space agency awarded Elon Musk’s company a contract worth up to $843 million to build a vehicle capable of launching into low-Earth orbit, attaching to the ISS and guiding it into the Pacific Ocean. The station will end up at Point Nemo—a spot in the southern Pacific named after the captain in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. Located more than 1,550 miles from the nearest piece of land, Point Nemo has become known as a spacecraft graveyard of sorts, with nations dumping more than 263 pieces of space debris there.

The plan to destroy the ISS is considered one of the safest and easiest disposal strategies for the massive piece of hardware, per BBC News’ Jonathan Amos. Officials had contemplated disassembling the station and recycling certain parts of it, as well as handing off operations of the ISS to a private company. They even proposed pushing the structure to a higher orbit, perhaps for historical preservation or analysis. Ultimately, however, the legal, financial and technical complexities of these options deterred NASA from pursuing them.

Having a spacecraft carry the ISS into the ocean “will help NASA and its international partners ensure a safe and responsible transition in low-Earth orbit at the end of station operations,” Ken Bowersox, NASA’s director of space operations, says in an agency statement. “This decision also supports NASA’s plans for future commercial destinations and allows for the continued use of space near Earth.”

Currently, the ISS orbits Earth every 90 minutes, passing above 90 percent of Earth’s population, and it has been continuously inhabited since November 2000. The laboratory and living space does, at times, show its 25-year age with minor technical difficulties—but it is scheduled to remain fully operational through at least the end of this decade.

As yet, few details are known about the commissioned SpaceX vessel, nor the number of other proposals it beat out for the mission.

But one way the deorbiting process could play out would begin while astronauts are still on board. First, the station could lower itself to an altitude of roughly 205 miles. Then, as the final humans prepare to depart, the SpaceX vessel would launch, roughly a year before splashdown is anticipated, per Scientific American’s Meghan Bartels.

Once attached to the vacant ISS, the deorbit vehicle would lower its altitude, steering the massive laboratory over the southern Pacific Ocean at appropriate speeds such that its breakup within the atmosphere—ideally minimal—wouldn’t scatter any debris over populated areas.

Though the station’s international partners agreed that 2030 will mark the end of its funding—and Russia’s space agency plans to leave the operation by 2028—NASA has previously stated the ISS could potentially function past that deadline.

“There’s nothing magical that happens in 2030,” Steve Stich, manager of NASA’s commercial crew program at the Johnson Space Center, said at a press conference in January. The agency is watching the development of commercial space stations that aim to take the place of the ISS in the coming years, he added. “When they’re ready to go, that’s when ISS will move out of the way.”

Still, according to Scientific American, the possibility remains that SpaceX will have to develop its deorbit vehicle on a tight timeline—if something does go wrong with the station, it could be retired early.

For the time being, though, the station will continue to carry out its research operations. To date, astronauts have conducted some 3,300 experiments in orbit. And lessons learned on the ISS will inform the commercial ventures looking to replace it, NASA says.

“The orbital laboratory remains a blueprint for science, exploration and partnerships in space for the benefit of all,” Bowersox says in NASA’s statement.

This isn’t the first time a space station has been decommissioned. In 2001, Russia’s Mir space station, an orbiting precursor to the ISS that had operated in low-Earth orbit since 1986, re-entered Earth’s atmosphere and crashed safely into the Pacific Ocean at Point Nemo.

Christian Thorsberg | READ MORE

Christian Thorsberg is an environmental writer and photographer from Chicago. His work, which often centers on freshwater issues, climate change and subsistence, has appeared in Circle of Blue, Sierra magazine, Discover magazine and Alaska Sporting Journal.