This will be the largest re-entry in history and, in March, Nasa asked Congress for funding to start development of a "space tug" that might be needed to perform the task – a spacecraft that can push the station back into the atmosphere. To prevent such a catastrophe in space from happening once more, the space station will be deorbited in 2031, bringing it through the atmosphere to safely splash down in the Pacific Ocean. "We really don’t want to go through that again," says Cathy Lewis, a space historian from the National Air and Space Museum in the US. "It is really one of the big international victories," says Thomas Zurbuchen, Nasa's former head of science.īut much of its hardware is decades old, which could eventually see the station become dangerous or even uncontrollable in orbit – a fate that befell the Soviet Union's Salyut 7 space station in 1985, requiring two cosmonauts to revive the tumbling station. It has been a boon for international collaboration, not least between the US and Russia, who partnered shortly after the fall of the Soviet Union. "The space station has been a huge success," says Josef Aschbacher, the head of the European Space Agency (Esa), one of the more than a dozen partners in the programme.
It has hosted more than 250 visitors from 20 countries since its first crew arrived in November 2000. The ISS has been orbiting the Earth since construction on it began in 1998. This raging inferno will crash into the ocean, across an area maybe thousands of kilometres in length, signalling the end of one of humanity's greatest projects – the International Space Station (ISS). Tearing through the sky will be some 400 tonnes (880,000lbs) of metal, set aglow by its re-entry through the atmosphere.
Drift into the wrong part of the Pacific Ocean in eight years, and you might be in for a shock.
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