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NASA says the International Space Station is scheduled to be replaced in the 2030s, but it will be a long time before the orbiting laboratory officially reaches the end of its life.
SpaceX’s newly launched re-entry vehicle will propel the International Space Station (ISS) into Earth’s atmosphere about 12 to 18 months after the complex “slides down” from its normal orbit. “We’re going to leave the crew on board for as long as possible so they’re available to help maintain the station and keep it healthy,” Dana Weigel, NASA’s ISS program manager, told reporters during a live-streamed briefing of the re-entry plan today (July 17).
“Here is our plan: [the astronauts] Once the ISS reaches about 220 kilometers, it will have to leave about six months before the final re-entry [136 miles]“This is the lowest level that human vehicles can fly,” Weigel said, explaining. “For comparison, a typical ISS orbit is 250 miles (400 km) above the Earth.
NASA selected the orbital lander last month, saying it would award SpaceX up to $843 million for development (this figure does not include launch costs). The selection comes after NASA solicited proposals from the aerospace community in March 2023, then again in September 2023, for a “space tug” or “U.S. deorbit vehicle (USDV)” concept that could land U.S. segments of the ISS.
Relating to: NASA selects SpaceX to build orbiter for International Space Station
The SpaceX orbital lander will be based on the company’s Dragon spacecraft design, which has sent cargo variants to the ISS since 2012 and carried crews to the lab since 2020. Sarah Walker, director of Dragon mission management at SpaceX, said at the same briefing that the complex mission will feature an “enhanced fuselage section” that includes customized engines, avionics, power generation and additional fuel tanks, among other things.
“One of the benefits of leveraging Dragon’s rich flight history is that we can continue to use NASA-approved hardware for many key systems, such as the docking system,” he said. “While the assembly-level design was uniquely developed for this mission,” he added, “we are intentionally using the building blocks of components that NASA is familiar with and that SpaceX has extensive experience building and operating.”
SpaceX is the dominant player in ISS operations. The company, created by billionaire Elon Musk, benefits from vertical integration (owning much of the supply chain needed for space launches) in a way its competitors don’t. Not only does SpaceX launch both crew and cargo to the ISS, it also has NASA funding for a Starship contract to land astronauts on the moon. (The Starship contract is behind schedule, and one reason the first human lunar landing in more than 50 years has been delayed by at least a year is that NASA wants a “significant number” of successful Starship launches before it can get astronauts on board.)
SpaceX also carries lucrative military- and U.S. government-funded satellite missions into space, launching its own Starlink broadband satellites several times a month aboard SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket, one of the world’s most reliable launch vehicles. (The Falcon 9 is currently grounded after a rare launch failure, but SpaceX hopes the Federal Aviation Administration will allow it to launch again while the mandatory accident investigation continues.)
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SpaceX’s approach to the ISS deorbit vehicle was praised in an official source selection document published on the government procurement website SAM.gov on Tuesday (July 16). “SpaceX’s approach significantly increases the probability of producing a highly reliable USDV, minimizes new development and testing, and reduces the risk of the government delivering the USDV late, greatly increasing the potential for successful contract performance,” the document said.
Northrop Grumman (NG), a major SpaceX competitor that currently launches cargo missions to the ISS, had a higher total cost for the project. The document added that it was “particularly concerning” that NG’s space tug idea might not work at certain “solar beta” angles. (These angles, according to NASA, are between the ISS’s orbit in space and an imaginary line connecting the sun and Earth.)
“In the face of this vulnerability, NASA is forced to choose between a potentially lengthy and costly NG system redesign, which would provide NASA with greater flexibility when planning ISS deorbit operations, or a USDV launch that would limit NASA’s planned deorbit schedule,” the source selection document said.
Currently, most of the ISS consortium is committed to operations by 2030, while Russia says it will stay until at least 2028. Russia is leaving the consortium after the internationally condemned Ukraine war, and that exit was launched without provocation in 2022. While most of the world has pulled out of Russia’s launch business, it has turned to China and North Korea, countries frequently cited in Congressional testimony as security risks to the US.
NASA officials have stressed that the ISS’s completion date depends on when new commercial station replacements funded by the agency become available. “We want [the commercial stations] “They need to get on track to be supportive, and when they’re ready, the ISS will get out of the way,” Steve Stich, manager of NASA’s commercial crew program at the Johnson Space Center (JSC) in Houston, said in a briefing earlier this year.
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And on the U.S. side, there are financial and political reasons to keep the experiments going for as long as possible, at least from the perspective of lawmakers. China’s Tiangong space station could capture much of the lucrative low-Earth orbit market if the U.S. abandons the ISS early, Congress warned earlier this year. NASA is prohibited from entering into bilateral agreements or coordination with China under a 2011 congressional directive known as the Wolf amendment.
A group of companies are currently building commercial outposts. Axiom Space plans to deploy the modules to the ISS before separating them into a free-flying set known as the Axiom Station.
Other independent stations are also under construction: Orbital Reef is led by Amazon, Boeing, Blue Origin and Sierra Space; Starlab, led by Voyager Space, has involvement from Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman; and Vast Space expects to launch its first Haven-1 module in 2025.