Elon Musk‘s SpaceX on Wednesday revealed a conceptual illustration of the spacecraft it is designing to deorbit the International Space Station (ISS) and it resembles the company’s Dragon spacecraft.
What Happened: SpaceX posted the picture on X, while explaining that the spacecraft will have six times more propellant and four times the power of its Dragon spacecraft.
NASA chose SpaceX to develop and deliver the U.S. Deorbit vehicle (USDV) to deorbit the space station and ensure a lack of risk to populated areas in late June. SpaceX will develop the deorbit spacecraft under the contract valued at $843 million and NASA will take ownership afterward and operate it through the mission.
The space agency said in a statement on Wednesday that the deorbit spacecraft would move the station out of orbit and into a remote area of an ocean at the end of its operations around 2030.
Both the spacecraft and the station are expected to break up through the process of re-entry into Earth’s atmosphere. Any remnants will subsequently fall harmlessly into the ocean.
Why It Matters: Which launch vehicle will launch the deorbiting spacecraft into space has not been ascertained to date.
However, the deorbiting vehicle will be launched about one and a half years before the final re-entry burn, ISS program manager Dana Weigel said in a media teleconference on Wednesday. The crew will stay on board the station until 6 months before the final re-entry, they added.
Once the ISS reaches an altitude of about 140 miles, the USDV will “perform a series of burns to set us up for that final deorbit, and then four days later it will do the final re-entry burn,” Weigel said.
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