(Photo : ALEXANDER NEMENOV/AFP via Getty Images)
RUSSIA-JAPAN-SPACE-ISS
The International Space Station (ISS) is seen on the monitor after the Soyuz MS-20 space craft undocked from the ISS, starting the landing of the International space crew including Japanese space tourists Yusaku Maezawa and his assistant Yozo Hirano, and Russian cosmonaut Alexander Misurkin, at Mission Control Center in Korolyov, outside Moscow, early on December 20, 2021.
The International Space Station (ISS) will be decommissioned in the early 2030s by causing it to lose orbit and hit Point Nemo, where it's the safest part of the planet to do so. This area is the spacecraft cemetery in one of the remotest places on terra-firma.
ISS is one of the first steps to have a foothold in space, with the Chinese Tiangong space station as the second permanent man-made structure in orbit.
ISS to be destroyed in 2031
In 2031, NASA will start the slow de-orbit of the space station, which is 930,000lbs, but not all the parts will be destroyed upon re-entry. Pieces will indeed crash and sink in a selected portion of the Pacific Ocean, reported the Daily Mail.
Nemo is the one place where the debris and a remote area on earth. No one lives there, and it has been where spacecraft and satellite died and were sunk in the depth of the ocean.
It was first launched in 1998 that should have been up for only fifteen years but was extended to thirty years when it finally crashed back to earth in the Pacific.
The US space agency checks on the station superstructure indicates it will last until 2030. The station is undergoing stresses from docking and undocking, and the modules of Russia have dangerous leaks, cited Sky News.
According to the US space agency, the transition phase will be a series of modules owned by corporations as the successor of the International Space Station, which will be destroyed at Point Nemo.
Space becomes commercialized
The main goal is to separate module components and be only operational space stations. Three modules will be up before 2030, which are corporate property.
Such a setup will have NASA as a customer of these space ventures, no more running its own. Companies like SpaceX will be used to get astronauts on and off the space complex, noted NASA.
The ISS has been the center of international space cooperation during its lifetime, where nations are neutral in space endeavors.
Operating past the fifteen-year plan and its subsequent extension to past two decades; to thirty-one years in orbit when it returns as debris.
Staying up more than last 15 years and operation longer than expected, by the time it decommissioned and operational for more than 20.
The US government will follow a plan till 2030 when corporations are in space conducting space-related activities.
As the station ages, so do the main structure that will not support the modules by the end-of-life operation.
More functional structures like the newest ones with the older modules that can be used will be detached from the main structure. Once it gets lower than 253 miles orbit, it enters the atmosphere.
Chinese space station
The main ISS module goes down by the Chinese Tiangong space station already in service. Russia will have it's own using the ISS modules.
Phil McAlister, NASA's commercial director, remarked that the private sector would take over the low earth orbit structures.
It's time for International Space Station to come to an end at Point Nemo as its structure cannot go beyond 2031. But technology has enabled a way to move into space as the next frontier.
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