The world will be watching—literally—as SpaceX tackles possibly what might be its highest-stakes endeavor to date: safely destroying the beloved International Space Station
. The demolition will shove the iconic and enormous station down through Earth’s atmosphere in a fiery display. And if anything goes wrong, a cascade of debris could rain down on our planet’s surface.
Whatever the deorbit vehicle ends up looking like, SpaceX is taking on a delicate technical challenge. The ISS is perhaps the most complex construction project ever executed—and certainly the largest and most expensive one in space. Beginning in 1998 its modules required 42 different launches to blast off Earth. And the orbiting laboratory contains about as much internal space as a six-bedroom house spread over an area the size of a football field.
Some nostalgic observers want to see parts of the station excised intact and ferried safely to Earth’s surface, bound for a museum, but that’s just as logistically challenging as a permanent ultrahigh orbit, NASA says. Although the space station was assembled in orbit, it wasn’t designed to be disassembled, and no current spacecraft has enough payload capacity to carry ISS modules back to Earth.
That’s where NASA’s contract with SpaceX comes into play. The commercial deorbit vehicle is meant to launch, attach to the space station and then pull it down through Earth’s atmosphere in a carefully choreographed, risk-minimizing maneuver.
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