NASA has formally signed a contract with Elon Musk's SpaceX, requiring the company to come up with a plan to destroy the International Space Station and implement it by any means, and American taxpayers will pay a huge $843 million for it.
You may think you're crazy, and you have to pay for someone to destroy your own things, but in fact, NASA is arranging the aftermath of the International Space Station. It has been 26 years since the first module was launched on the International Space Station in 1998, and some facilities have aged and failed more and more in recent years, so NASA has decided to retire it in 2030.
But decommissioning can't stay in orbit, otherwise it will become space junk, and once it is broken, everyone will not want to get out of the earth, so it needs to be derailed and destroyed. Since the International Space Station weighs 430 tons, it is not easy to go up and down, and it is impossible to burn completely, and there will inevitably be a lot of debris falling on the earth, and it will not be good to hit people, flowers and plants, so it needs to be allowed to fall to the spacecraft cemetery in the Pacific Ocean.
In the past, such things may have been handed over to Boeing and Lockheed Martin, but now they are all a little old, and there are always problems, NASA may be worried that they will have problems again, and second, they may be worried that they will open their mouths, so they handed over the $843 million contract to the space upstart - Musk's SpaceX.
According to the plan, the ISS will disintegrate in three stages, the solar panels and the radiators, then the individual modules, and finally the trusses. SpaceX needs to develop powerful rockets to drag them into the atmosphere, respectively.
I estimate that Musk will make a lot of money with this order, and may even ask to simply drag the ISS back to Earth at one time, because the starship developed now can send 100 tons of payload to Mars, and it is not a piece of cake to send 430 tons back to Earth, and a starship may be enough to complete the mission. According to the current development progress, by 2030, the cost of a "naked" starship without any decoration may be tens of millions of dollars at most, which is equivalent to the remaining $800 million in vain.
So what about the absence of an American space station in Earth orbit after 2030? This probably won't be, because many private companies are already building space stations, and the fastest is VAST, which plans to cooperate with SpaceX and launch it in 2025. Voyager, Lockheed Martin and Nanoracks will each launch a space station in 2027, and Bezos' Blue Origin is also preparing to launch a space station by 2030.
Therefore, if an International Space Station is planted and more space stations are launched, the Earth's orbit will only become more and more crowded, and it will not become more and more deserted, until one day the space junk locks the earth completely, and it may not be quiet.
(Image drawn by AI)