Crash in the Pacific, commercial stations… NASA is preparing the end of the ISS

In a report submitted to the US Congress, the agency unveils its plans for the last years of the international space station. The ISS will be deorbited in 2031 and fall into the ocean, far from any inhabited land, leaving the field open to private actors to build new “commercial” stations.

The countdown has begun: we now know that the International Space Station (ISS) will end its career in 2031 in the waters of the Pacific. NASA has just submitted a report to the US Congress detailing the end of life of the ISS, whose aging infrastructure cannot be repaired and maintained indefinitely – there are, for example, cracks and small air leaks under close surveillance in an old Russian module.

From 2026 at the earliest and until June 2030, the ISS will begin to very gradually lose altitude, falling from 420 to 340 kilometers above the Earth. Then three cargo ships will successively push it with a stroke of the engine to hasten its fall. In January 2031, the ISS modules will break apart upon entering the atmosphere.

This dismemberment will be controlled as precisely as possible, so that the debris will fall around Point Nemo in the South Pacific – the furthest point on Earth from any inhabited land, in the middle of nowhere between Easter Island , New Zealand, Antarctica and Chile. This is already where the Mir station crashed in 2001. But before its disintegration, the space station’s program remains busy: it still has a decade ahead of it and it will have to be, according to NASA, “most productive” of all…