SpaceX will supercharge its Dragon capsule to send the International Space Station to a watery retirement
In just a handful of years, a beefed-up version of SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft will launch on aThe ISS’s first modules reached orbit in 1998, and the station has been continuously crewed since 2000. But nothing lasts forever, not even the largest and most expensive piece of orbital infrastructure yet built by humankind. NASA has deemed the aging ISS too bulky and unwieldy to bring back to Earth intact or to boost into a higher, longer-lasting “graveyard” orbit.
“They’re calling it a bigger trunk, but it’s nothing like the little piece of carbon fiber that they use for a trunk now: it’s a much more sophisticated, complex spacecraft,” says Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian and an expert on spaceflight. “This is all old technology, yes, but you’re putting it together in a very new way.”
or other launchers in its class. Instead NASA—which has currently commissioned from SpaceX only the construction of the deorbit vehicle, not its launch or operations—will need to turn to a heavy launch vehicle.
Despite the emphasis on integrating trusted existing technology into the deorbit vehicle, the fact remains that humans have never disposed of a spacecraft as big as the ISS, which stretches nearly the length of a football field, contains more interior space than a six-bedroom house and weighs some 460 tons. Its predecessor in controlled space-habitat deorbits, Russia’s Mir station, was far more compact and weighed less than one third as much.
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