NASA Will Drop the International Space Station Into the Pacific Ocean by 2031

Launched in 1998, the International Space Station (ISS) orbiting about 200 miles above Earth has a few years left there.

NASA has published a transition plan of how the space station would retire by 2031. According to the plan, the ISS will crash into the Pacific Ocean. “Eventually, after performing maneuvers to line up the final target ground track and debris footprint over the South Pacific Oceanic Uninhabited Area (SPOUA), the area around Point Nemo, ISS operators will perform the ISS re-entry burn, providing the final push to lower ISS as much as possible and ensure safe atmospheric entry,” NASA explained in the report.

Point Nemo is a remote place on our planet in which over 250 pieces of space debris have sunk since 1971.

The space station has hosted 251 individuals from 19 countries, according to the US-based space agency’s information as of Dec. 2021. You can see a map depicting the visitors’ countries here.

The International Space Station has become, so to say, the guarantor of the existence of mankind in space. Several scientific studies have been conducted to reveal how things in microgravity work. Recently, astronauts aboard the ISS harvested space peppers for the first time as part of NASA’s Plant Habitat-04 investigation.

The International Space Station is a contributor to science

The ISS has been home to not only space studies but also attempts to understand how Earth’s climate conditions change. And NASA is not the sole player on the ISS. There is extensive cooperation with the participation of the European Space Agency, Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, Canadian Space Agency, and Russia’s Roscosmos.

“At a time when other nations are seeking to expand their abilities to operate in space, the ISS remains the sole example of how an international team can productively and successfully cooperate over the course of decades in space,” NASA underscored the collaboration in question.