What will happen to the ISS when it's de-orbited in 2030?

Table of Contents

• It’s time to say goodbye to the ISS

• What’s the plan for deorbit?

• Meet the USDV, built by SpaceX

• When and where will the ISS deorbit happen?

• Could the deorbit be delayed?

• What about leaving the ISS in orbit as a museum?

• Don’t private companies want it?

Will the ISS just fall out of the sky in 2030? What’s going to happen when we’re finished with Space Station?

Let’s dive into why we’re retiring this incredibly important laboratory, how it’ll come back to Earth — and why we can’t preserve it up there or bring it down and put it in a museum — and what might come next for low Earth orbit.

It’s time to say goodbye to the ISS

The ISS is an incredible piece of history. It’s been continuously occupied since November 2000, and thanks to Space Station we have 25 years of experience of what it’s like to live and work in space. But…the ISS is getting old. The original modules were designed to last 30 years, and by 2030 (which is when the ISS is scheduled for deorbit) we’ll be at 32 years. A lot of the original components are starting to show wear and tear.

For example, over on the Russian side of the space station, there’s an air leak in the Zvezda module that’s just getting worse and they haven’t been able to fix it. There are multiple tiny stress fractures in one of its docking ports that has a Progress module attached. (These are Russian resupply spacecraft that are also used to boost Space Station’s orbit). Now, we’ve known about this since 2019, and despite a lot of troubleshooting from cosmonauts, they still haven’t been able to pin it down.

The problem is that there are multiple microfractures and every time they fix one, there’s another to take its place, plus Russia’s space program isn’t exactly well funded right now, so they’re having to make do with what they have. They’ve gotten to the point where they just keep the hatch closed all the time when the docking port is not in use, but what happens if something like this occurs when there’s no simple solution? This leak is a big deal, and there’s not much we can do about it. It’s just one example of how the ISS is aging, and it’s probably time for the next thing. Space is a difficult environment for spacecraft.

What’s the plan for deorbit?

For awhile, NASA looked to Roscosmos for an answer. It’s a joint responsibility to manage the ISS’s end of life in a responsible manner. The thing is the size of a football field and weighs nearly a billion pounds (453 million kg). Letting it deorbit in an uncontrolled re-entry could be catastrophic.

But they thought that it might be possible to attach three Progress spacecraft to the station in order to control that de-orbit. The Russian side controls ISS propulsion, and Progress is the spacecraft we already use to boost the ISS. The idea was to bring the ISS down in one piece, with the three Progress spacecraft controlling descent to ensure that whatever didn’t burn up in the atmosphere came down within about a 2,000 km radius of ocean.

Why not bring it down in multiple pieces? Well, as Dana Weigel, the ISS program manager at NASA, has pointed out, the ISS was designed to be assembled in space. It’s not designed to be disassembled, and the cost of doing so for preservation would be astronomical. NASA doesn’t have that kind of budget, and there’s no spacecraft large enough to bring down significantly sized pieces of the ISS after the Space Shuttle’s retirement. However, NASA has partnered with the Smithsonian to make sure smaller pieces will be preserved.

For the same reason, they also couldn’t just replace the oldest modules and continue operating the ISS. While they can replace things like solar panels and other equipment, those core modules just weren’t designed to be taken apart or replaced.

But it turned out that the plan of using multiple Progress wouldn’t work. There still wouldn’t be enough power for the size of the ISS and how much control you’d need through atmospheric drag. Plus the Russian segment just wasn’t designed to operate three Progress spacecraft at the same time.

Meet the USDV, built by SpaceX

The international partners agreed that NASA would look for a U.S. company to create a de-orbit vehicle. Nothing we currently have is powerful enough to do the job — you need a LOT of engines and a TON of propellant for this, plus existing spacecraft designed for the ISS are dependent on functional Space Station systems once they dock. The deorbit vehicle won’t have that, so would need to be more independent.

NASA highlighted that they wanted the design to be based on flight-proven hardware — basically they wanted an iteration of something that already was flying in space, or had flown successfully, rather than an entirely new design. It’s not surprising SpaceX was awarded the contract, they really have the most successful spacecraft program right now.

(According to the Source Selection Statement for the contract, there was only one other bid — Northrop Grumman — and their proposal was more expensive, with both a lower mission suitability score AND lower past performance rating).

The vehicle, called the U.S. deorbit vehicle or USDV, will be based on the existing Dragon 2 cargo spacecraft. This is an illustration from SpaceX of what the USDV will look like.

You can see that the trunk is much larger than on a regular Dragon.

The trunk, by the way, is what’s been the subject of a lot of discussion lately because it hasn’t been fully burning up in the atmosphere and large, heavy pieces of debris have been found from Crew Dragon re-entries. For more on that, check out my newsletter. As an update, SpaceX is solving the problem by jettisoning the trunk after the deorbit burn and moving splashdown to the Pacific Ocean.

SpaceX will use a regular Dragon cargo vehicle for the USDV but the trunk will be much, much larger — more like a service module of a spacecraft. It will have propulsion, propellant tanks, avionics, power generation, and thermal hardware. There will be 46 total Draco engines on the spacecraft — 16 will be on the capsule already, as they always are, but a normal Dragon trunk doesn’t have any engines. This one will have 30, with an estimated four times the amount of thrust that a regular Dragon has.

If you’re wondering why SpaceX didn’t use Starship for this? It’s actually too powerful. They don’t want to break apart the ISS prematurely because of the stress Starship would put on the ISS when docked and firing its engines.

When and where will the ISS deorbit happen?

NASA hasn’t decided on precisely where the ISS will go, it’s very possibly the South Pacific Ocean, but that hasn’t been determined yet. Much of it will burn up on the way down; modeling suggests there is very little that will actually hit the surface of the ocean.

There are variables out of NASA’s control in terms of timing, but the current plan is for end of life to be at the end of 2030, with a splashdown in January of 2031. That would put the launch date of USDV at 2028 to early 2029, likely on a Falcon Heavy or other heavy lift rocket (maybe Starship or ULA’s Vulcan) because a regular rocket won’t cut it with the amount of propellant USDV has to take up.

The last ISS crew will actually start descending with the space station. The USDV will head up while the station is still crewed and astronauts will check the vehicle out and put it through its paces. The last crew will abandon the station about 6 months before re-entry. NASA doesn’t want anyone on the station once it hits 330 km/205 miles altitude because things will stop working properly.

They’ll let atmospheric drag do as much of the deorbit work as possible to conserve propellant, and then the USDV will perform a massive re-entry burn to ensure that the ISS deorbits safely and whatever debris is left is confined to the target area.

Could the deorbit be delayed?

Yes, it can. That will of course depend on NASA finding the budget to extend operations, but Ken Bowersox, who is the associate administrator of NASA’s space operations mission directorate, made clear that NASA doesn’t want to de-orbit the ISS without the next generation of space stations in place. They want there to be some overlap in low Earth orbit of ISS and commercial space stations.

NASA is working with private partners on these low Earth orbit space stations — this includes Blue Origin, Axiom Space, Starlab LLC, and there are others in development as well. The idea is that there would be a space station to pass the torch to. This isn’t the end of space stations in low Earth orbit — it’s the beginning of the next phase, of turning low Earth orbit to commercial providers and NASA focusing on the moon with the Artemis program.

What about leaving the ISS in orbit as a museum?

But why deorbit the ISS? Why not boost its orbit and leave it up there as a museum, or bring it down in pieces to be able to save some of it?

Well, a lot of that comes down to money. NASA is operating in a limited budget environment, and they have to make do with the money Congress gives them. I hear a lot of complaints because I talk so much about budget and money when it comes to NASA — but budget is EVERYTHING. They can’t do anything without money, and they can’t fund everything they want to.

But also, it’s just not really practical. Here’s the thing — Space Station requires constant maintenance. It was never designed to operate independently without crew aboard. You can’t just boost the orbit, turn off the lights, and leave it there indefinitely as a museum. It’s not going to survive that (even at a higher orbit, the ISS would require reboosts every couple of years), and NASA, Roscosmos, and other international partners have to handle this responsibly, rather than just leaving it there and hoping for the best. To boost it higher than this, where it wouldn’t require regular reboosts, they’d still have to design a new vehicle because any current ones just aren’t powerful enough.

And there would also be the problem of getting back there in a timely manner — at this point, most ISS vehicles are designed around reaching the ISS at its current altitude, 257 miles or 415 km up, in terms of engine power and propulsion tank size, and as I mention, they depend on the ISS’s functional, fully working systems (which wouldn’t be the case, as I mentioned, if there was no one aboard to maintain these systems) once these vehicles have docked.

There’s also the problem of space junk — if they boost the ISS into a higher orbit, the debris environment is intense. Space Station would likely disturb this debris and create an even bigger problem for itself and other spacecraft, it’s not really a good option. The likelihood it would be destroyed by impact of space debris at a higher orbit is MUCH higher — and with no one aboard to maneuver Space Station, it would fragment and then fall back to Earth in an uncontrolled re-entry.

Don’t private companies want it?

NASA also talked to private industry about handing the ISS over to commercial space, but there’s a problem with that: the ISS is INTERNATIONAL — a joint partnership between NASA, Roscosmos, the ESA (European Space Agency), CSA (Canadian Space Agency), and JAXA (the Japanese space agency). It’s not something that a private company (or multiple companies) could easily just take over. And NASA did ask commercial companies if they’d want to take and reuse parts of the ISS — the answer was no, which honestly isn’t surprising. Much of the ISS infrastructure is 1990s era technology — we’ve come a long way since then, and commercial space would rather use the latest technology than this legacy hardware.