Elon Musk’s space company SpaceX has won an $843 million contract to safely destroy NASA’s International Space Station (ISS). The ISS, which will be decommissioned in 2030, will be guided to Earth by SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft, where it will break up in the atmosphere in a controlled manner and fall into the ocean.
The ISS, approximately 400 km above the Earth in orbit, allowed experiments that could not be done anywhere else to be carried out.
The US space agency has described the ISS as “an unprecedented achievement in the global human effort to build and operate a research platform in space.”
NASA will allow the ISS to slowly approach Earth after operations end for 18 months.
A spacecraft will then dock with the ISS and use its thrusters to guide the space station toward Earth.
Elon Musk’s SpaceX company won the $843 million contract to undertake this mission.
The vehicle will have six times more fuel capacity and four times more thrust than a standard Dragon.
The ISS will largely disintegrate and burn up as it passes through Earth’s atmosphere.
However, the larger modules of the space station will land at a “final splashdown” point after passing through the atmosphere. NASA has not yet shared the location of that spot with the public.
One of them is China’s Tiangong space station, which has been in orbit since 2021.
On the other hand, SpaceX has signed many contracts with NASA over the years.
Most recently, the company signed a $256 million deal to launch NASA’s Dragonfly mission to explore Saturn’s largest moon, Titan.
A Falcon Heavy rocket will launch NASA’s Dragonfly rotorcraft from Kennedy Space Center in Florida between July 5 and July 25, 2028.
The journey to Titan will take six years, meaning the spacecraft will land in 2034.
