The International Space Station (ISS), like most things, wasn’t meant to last forever. As the station ages, NASA reports that this decade in space will be its last. Sometime in 2031, the space agency plans to end the ISS’s run by crashing it in the middle of the ocean.
Crashing the station, which weighs in at 419,725 kilograms (more than 925,000 pounds), will not be easy. NASA will do so by slowly lowering it from its current orbit at 253 miles above the surface, so that it will enter the atmosphere in January 2031. From there, it will likely begin to break up before, hopefully, crashing into a designated point in the ocean. It’s getting it to hit this exact location, in this case Point Nemo in the south Pacific Ocean, that is the tricky part. Any number of factors, like solar activity, could affect the station’s trajectory and cause it to miss its target.
“Extending operations through 2030 will continue another productive decade of research advancement and enable a seamless transition of capabilities in low Earth orbit to one or more commercially owned and operated destinations in the late 2020s,” NASA said.
