international space station decommission

While no one was harmed, this led to reforms and “design for demise” guidelines.ĭesign for demise is an important principle for the engineering of satellites and other orbiting space infrastructure. In 1979, Nasa’s Skylab station was not re-fuelled in time and came crashing down, out of control, leaving chunks of the station scattered across Australia. In fact, it would not be the first space station to fall out of the sky. If degradation or unplanned damage occurs before the official decommissioning, a free-falling ISS poses serious dangers. While Nasa has committed to maintaining the station until 2030, its partner organisations are yet to officially sign on, meaning the final decision to de-orbit will depend on politics as much as engineering. Despite this, Nasa assesses there is “high confidence” the station will see it through to the end of 2030. In 2016, a fly-away speck of paint chipped a window, and just last year, ISS crew went into evacuation standby when Russia obliterated a dead satellite with a missile, causing thousands of pieces of debris to fly by the station at 5km per second. The rise of flying space junk also poses unplanned and catastrophic risk of destruction. It is used to test future spacecraft technologies and to study health effects of long-term space flight for the possibility of future human exploration of the solar system.

The ISS also helps to monitor Earth’s ecosystems and natural disasters in real time. Research in the so-called microgravity environment of the ISS has yielded breakthroughs in drug discovery, vaccine development and medical treatments in the last decade. It is visible by the naked eye from Earth while it completes its 16 daily orbits, passing 400km above the Earth’s surface. The monumental conglomerate structure now stretches the length of a football field and is the largest human-made object in space. The modules and parts of the ISS have been built progressively by many different countries, only coming into contact for the first time in space. The ISS has enabled one giant leap for science and collaboration across mankind, involving five different space agencies (US, Russia, Europe, Canada and Japan). It has already been in operation for 21 years, and Nasa has given the go-ahead for one more decade, thereby doubling its total planned time in orbit. Originally commissioned for a 15-year lifespan, the ISS is outliving all expectations. Nasa’s plans for the decommissioning operation will culminate in a fiery plunge into the middle of the Pacific Ocean – a location called Point Nemo, also known as the “spacecraft graveyard”, the furthest point from all civilisation.įinding Point Nemo will be the final stop in a complex and multi-staged mission to transition the operations of the ISS to new commercial space stations, and to bring the remaining structure safely down to Earth. After dozens of launches since 1998 got the station up and into orbit, bringing it down will be a feat of its own – the risks are serious if things go wrong. Nasa has announced plans for the International Space Station (ISS) to be officially decommissioned in 2031. Named after a character in Jules Verne’s novel “Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea,” Point Nemo is the furthest point in the ocean from shore and has served as a graveyard for many other spacecraft.Heather Muir, a PhD candidate in computational physics at Cambridge University, on the many risks involved in getting the station from orbit to the Pacific Ocean’s Point Nemo ‘spacecraft graveyard’ In the International Space Station Transition Report, NASA said the ISS was expected to fall back to Earth in an area known as the South Pacific Uninhabited Ocean Area, also known as Point Nemo. “The report we submitted to Congress outlines, in detail, our comprehensive plan to ensure a smooth transition to commercial destinations following the decommissioning of the International Space Station in 2030,” McAlister added. We look forward to sharing our lessons learned and operations experience with the private sector to help them develop safe, reliable, and cost-effective space destinations, ” said Phil McAlister, Director of Commercial Space at Headquarters, in a statement. “The private sector is technically and financially capable of developing and operating commercial destinations in low Earth orbit, with the help of NASA.

International space station decommission