SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said on Friday that the deorbiting of the International Space Station (ISS) and its subsequent burning up during re-entry into Earth’s atmosphere will be “a very dramatic event” with the sky over the Pacific showing streaks of light resembling shooting stars.
What Happened: “This will be a very dramatic event. Sky full of shooting stars, albeit over an empty region of the Pacific (but we will still get great video),” Musk wrote on X about the ISS’s disposal scheduled for around 2030.
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.
Talking about the hardships involved in the process, Musk said that it will be “harder than it may seem.”
“ISS has pretty low max thrust limits, as the solar arrays are very floppy, but requires a high total impulse to deorbit with precision,” the CEO said on Friday.
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.
The spacecraft designed for the deorbiting of the space station will have six times more propellant and four times the power of its Dragon spacecraft, SpaceX said earlier this week. A conceptual image of the vehicle shared by the company also shows certain resemblances to SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft.
The ISS, which was launched in 1998, is operated by space agencies from the U.S., Europe, Japan, Canada, and Russia. All countries except Russia have committed to operating the station until 2030. Russia has only pledged to participate until 2028.
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