The International Space Station will burn up and splash down into the Pacific sometime around 2030. What could possibly go wrong? And will we ever see anything like the ISS again?
, as well as being the most expensive object ever made, can also lay claim to being one of the most cooperative endeavours in scientific history. Since the beginning of the century, it has been continuously inhabited by a total of 280 crew members – and counting – from 23 countries. While leaders on the ground have been squabbling or even threatening war,
But nothing lasts forever. Sometime around 2030, the ISS project will come to an end. From its orbit about 400 kilometres above Earth, the space station will fall through the atmosphere, burning up and splintering into a thousand pieces before crashing into thereenter the atmosphere all the time – almost every day, in fact. But the $150 billion ISS is no ordinary satellite.
Managing the end of the ISS’s life is far from straightforward. How can such a cumbersome object, all 420,000 kilograms of it, be brought down and destroyed safely? Should it be destroyed at all? And will we ever see its ilk again?dates back to the cultural chauvinism of the 1980s, when NASA – calling it “Freedom” – intended it to challenge the Soviet space…
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