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The International Space Station (ISS) is both the most expensive object ever built and one of the most collaborative endeavors in the history of science. Since the beginning of this century, the ISS has been continuously home to 280 crew members from 23 countries, and the numbers are growing. While leaders on Earth squabble and threaten war, the astronauts orbit the Earth in serene microgravity, unconstrained by geopolitical boundaries.
But nothing lasts forever. Around 2030, the ISS project will come to an end. The space station will fall from an orbit about 400 km above Earth into the atmosphere, burn up, break into a thousand pieces, and crash into the Pacific Ocean, never to be seen again.
Satellites re-enter the atmosphere constantly — almost daily, in fact — but the $150 billion ISS is no ordinary satellite. At over 100 meters long and as heavy as a fully loaded jumbo jet, it is by far the largest and most complex satellite ever built.
Managing the end of the ISS’s life will be no easy task: How to safely bring down and destroy such an unwieldy object, weighing a total of 420,000 kilograms? Should it be destroyed at all? And will we ever see such an object again?
The history of this space station dates back to the cultural chauvinism of the 1980s, when NASA tried to counter the Soviet space program with a project called “Freedom”…
