The ISS has been confirmed to be deorbited as it reaches the end of its orbital life in 2030.

I was a young child when Skylab burned up on re-entry. The fire was so bright it could be seen in the afternoon in Northern California. Live-streaming this would be amazing.

They contracted spacex to do it. So there's going to be a 10 camera 4K live stream, on X.

I will add one tentative calendar event in 2030 labeled "have a good cry"... because I will definitely get emotional.

I want a camera in front and behind it, too!

And crash it in to a flat earth convention.

I actually hope they put a shitload of cameras inside it as well, and leave it pressurized just to see what happens to a spacecraft that has a hull breach during reentry.

Attach a starlink terminal to every single module as well so it still can broadcast some feed as it breaks apart

SpaceX has been hired to deorbit right? They could very easily record and or stream with the help of Starlink, look at how much Starship reentry we got live!

The music should be triumphant, not sad.

i doubt we will ever have a scientific spacestation like that in the next 100 years

Gateway is looking like the ISS successor, an international space station in lunar orbit.

China already has its own space station, Russia is planning to build a new space station by itself in the next decade. ISS will be replaced but it's not gonna be as collaborative and impressive.

Not officially, but there are a lot of private space station projects. And starship's internal volume in the crewed variant will actually be something like just about half the ISS, and besides stand alone space stations, there's more than a few ideas out there of just docking multiple starships together with a central module.

Closest analog would be the Lunar Gateway, but this will be orbiting the Moon rather than Earth and isn't made for more than temporary habitation. That being said, the station has dedicated space both internally and externally for scientific research and will be used as a testbed for human survival outside the protective shell of our ionosphere. In particular, JAXA, the Japanese space agency, will be integrating equipment to monitor radiation, dust particles, and other things that pose a significant risk of permanently manned like the ISS has been. One interesting side to this is that because the station will spend most of its time unmanned, it needs to be able to take care of itself to some degree. You can look at it like one big robotic experiment! After announcing the project some time ago, NASA went dark until recently when they announced that not only was the project going well, it's exceeding expectations and has expanded scope. My guess is that issues with the space launch system and Artemis programs put the Gateway in doubt for a time since that is the platform and mission set that will bring the structure into orbit. I believe Artemis IV is when they start.

Besides Gateway, there's a company called Axiom Space which is making a commercial space station for companies to rent research space. It's been heavily encouraged by NASA and the executives come from the leadership team of the ISS project. They have a countdown to the launch of their first component on their website.

It's sad to see the ISS go, but we're certainly not taking a step back. NASA has determined that Earth orbiting stations are at a reasonable level for commercial alternatives to take over and has set its eyes on long-term human habitation in deep space!

China already has a space station in orbit

Axiom space is launching a station that will be built off the side of the ISS and then detached. Their staff also just so happens to be mostly people who used to work on the ISS.

I wouldn’t be surprised if a billionaire just buys it and makes it a space hotel for a while longer

Do you know why they don't just upgrade it? The principle of the iss is it's customizable, that is why so many countries could contribute to it.

It still pisses me off by how little money the US puts into NASA. Space is the future for us. It surrounds us. And has all the materials we could ever need. Ignoring it is dumb. Literally 0.37% of the US’s Budget is spent on NASA.

Kerbal Space Hotel

This is the sad thing about sending things to space. It cost so much to send there. It's not worth it to bring it back. It would be so cool to have a museum of all these devices we send into space but it just wouldn't make sense.

I think a better solution would be to dismantle it an put together a museum on earth

You're not the only one, I'll sob with u if u want 😭

This is most likely I think. NASA always has contingency plans for everything including loosing their budget for something so they must plan for everything including de-orbit operations.

The de-orbit date is the date at which NASA will de-orbit the ISS if there is no additional funding provided to extend the mission. The ISS has always had de-orbit dates as far as I know and they are always being pushed back. The de-orbit date is likely derived from how long the current budget is projected to last with orbital calculations factored in to provide room for error. If the ISS gets another 5 years worth of funding, then the de-orbit date will be pushed back ~5 years depending on projected costs of operations and orbital status.

Down.

It would take an astronomical amount of delta-v (simply put - fuel) to send the ISS into the sun, compared to the amount you'd need to send it back down to earth.

It's uncommonly talked about, but actually "falling" into the sun is pretty hard. Sending something as large and massive as the ISS would be virtually impossible, considering the thrusters it has on it are for simple things like attitude control and orbit maintenance.

For reference, the Parker solar probe has needed to get several (and counting) gravity assists from Venus to even come close (so far closest, and yet not quite close enough) to deorbiting into the sun - and it is currently the fastest man-made object in the known universe.

My vote is we leave it for the space worms

Although it is easy to look at the state of the world and become discouraged, this could not be farther from the truth! Scientific cooperation continues to hold healthy, especially in space. The Lunar Gateway, which will in some sense be the spiritual successor of the ISS, involves a higher degree of proportionally equal contributions from those involved compared to the ISS. NASA along with space agencies around the world have expressed cooperation as one of the foundations of this station, and they all sound so excited about it. I had the pleasure of witnessing a live panel where representatives from the Japanese, European, and Canadian space agencies specifically praised the coordination involved, stating that experience learned from the ISS has enabled them to work well with each other. Besides the station itself, both the Artemis missions and the framework they are laying for moon infrastructure and development are heavily cooperative, with members of the Artemis accords agreeing to standardize systems of power, communication, scientific study, and so much more. It's never been a more exciting time to cooperate with science! Don't be discouraged; be excited!!

We have far bigger projects in the works, if everything goes right will be replacing the ISS with a lunar base. It took 60 years, but we are finally are actually gonna study the moon.

Yeah who died on it

I think he just hangs around, space programs are a gold mine for death entities.

It still might not. 2030 is 6 years away. You might be dead by then.

SO DO YOU.

I’m no expert but they will probably choose a remote location on an ocean and make it crash there

Point Nemo, Pacific Ocean

Interestingly, the ISS is in a very low orbit and has to be boosted up occasionally because it still experiences drag from the atmosphere. If it were left to time it would eventually deorbit itself. But just like it's safer to demolish an unstable building than leave it up, the plan is to have a controlled deorbit into point Nemo, a spot in the Pacific Ocean that's used as a spacecraft cemetery. I like to imagine coral growing on old spacecraft, but I imagine point Nemo is too deep for that

Uh, there won't be much of it making it back to the surface

It won't. They looked into it before the decision was made and bringing pieces down would almost cost as much as it was to build the thing.

There was Mir until 2001

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it's going to SpaceX, not Elon musk directly. he's a horrible asshole, SpaceX is a good company

I agree with you. The whole commercialization thing has not been the best, but this case is a bit different. It's more similar to NASA's classic style of contracting, where SpaceX has been contracted to build it, but NASA will take full ownership and control afterward. Like the Titan IIIE, for example. The only difference now is that NASA gave SpaceX the contract instead of the usual legacy contractors like Boeing or Lockheed Martin.

Because it's a lot cheaper for spacex to do it. Look at the cost of dragon vs the cost of starliner (55million per seat vs 90 million per seat and starliner has been nothing but problems) Spacex is not only reliable but cheap as hell.

Redditors need to realize that the things they hear on reddit do not represent reality.

How could NASA do it themselves? They don’t have any rockets, by design. NASA contracts out building rockets to contractors

I don't know if such a station would work. To make radial acceleration feel like gravity, the rotating wheel station would need to be VERY large. At least 200 m in diameter. And the center, non-rotating section used for docking and communication arrays would require some quite complex parts.

It's not impossible to build but it's extremely expensive and extremely dangerous.

It would most likely just make everyone sick since when you are standing up, your head is closer to the centre and would thus experience stronger "gravity". In order to combat this, the wheel would need to be MASSIVE where the centre of the wheel cannot be utilised.

Some gear is probably cooked beyond logical repair, after all, it spends so much time directly under the sunlight, without any atmosphere protecting it.