NASA is set to invest $1 billion into its "deorbit module" to tug the International Space Station (ISS) at the end of its operational life.

The module will be operational by the end of the decade and will provide redundancy for safely disposing of the station. The agency also released additional details on Mar. 13 regarding its fiscal year 2024 budget proposal.

NASA's ISS Deorbit Module

Authorities revealed an outline of the proposal, which the White House published on Mar. 9, where they requested $27.2 billion, a 7.1% increase from 2024 that is more or less in line with rising inflation.

Within the budget proposal, one of the biggest new initiatives of the agency is the ISS deorbit tug, designed to perform the final lowering of the station's orbit. This would ensure that the ISS reenters over the South Pacific. NASA first indicated the plans for this module in a request for information in August last year, as per Space News.

NASA is requesting $180 million for the tug that would give them a "health start" for the project, said the agency's associate administrator for space operations, Kathy Lueders, in a media teleconference about the budget proposal.

However, the budget documents of the space agency needed to include a spending profile for the project itself. But Lueders noted that they came up with a cost estimate that was slightly short of $1 billion. She said that the exact amount would depend on what proposals the agency receives from the space industry from an upcoming proposal request (RFP).

The space agency previously planned to use a cargo spacecraft, particularly Russia's Progress, to deorbit the ISS. In the agency's request for information last year, officials concluded that they would need additional aircraft that could provide more robust capabilities for deorbit efforts. Thus, they decided to ask the industry for concepts.

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Redundancies for Safety

According to Space, the planned deorbit model will supplement the existing deorbit capabilities of the International Space Station partners, which are the space agencies of the US, Russia, Europe, Canada, and Japan. Lueders noted that the space agency was working on developing the US capability to have a safety backup and to aid better the targeting of the station and its safe return, especially if more modules are added.

She noted that in the past few years, it had been seen that having such redundancies have been crucial to both themselves and their partners. Furthermore, having a US deorbit vehicle is another key linchpin in the country's space operations and deorbit strategy of the ISS itself.

The situation comes as United States President Joe Biden is requesting, for the third year in a row, a significant increase in funding for NASA. This decision is undeterred by the space agency's results in the last two years. Despite Congress increasing NASA's budget last year, it was less than what the agency requested, said Space Policy Online.

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