The space station's international focus has been a "wonderful thing in many ways", says Duncan Steel, a space scientist at Xerra Earth Observation Institute in New Zealand. Given the space station's decades of international cooperation - not to mention the cash needed to get it up and running (it's the most expensive object ever built) - why will it be dragged down and destroyed?Īnd once it's gone, what will take its place? Why is the ISS being retired? On New Year's Eve, NASA extended the space station's operations from 2024 to 2030. ![]() That day will mark the end of 32 years of space station construction, experiments, photography and - since November 2000 - continuous human habitation, all while hurtling around the planet once every 90 minutes or so. The iconic piece of space infrastructure will be nudged out of its orbit and eventually meet its watery demise when it plunges into the ocean and smashes into smithereens. The first module, being built by the Energia corporation, would cost at least $5 billion and could go into orbit as soon as 2025.The clock is ticking for the International Space Station, with NASA last week declaring plans to let it plummet back to Earth in 2031. That schedule, too, doesn't seem to fit well with assertions that the demise of Russia's involvement in the ISS project is imminent.Įither way, Russia already has advanced plans to build a successor space station to the ISS, according to (opens in new tab). He also said Roscosmos proposals for cooperation on the ISS project after 2024 had been sent to the Russian government and President Putin.Īnd in another story on TASS dated the same day (opens in new tab), Rogozin said that Russia would begin to test "one-orbit" flights to the ISS by Soyuz spacecraft (opens in new tab) in 20 – a trip that usually requires the spacecraft to make at least four Earth orbits. Russia's missile test could have easily obliterated the International Space Station CERN halts future collaboration with Russia The International Space Station will plunge into the sea in 2031, NASA announces "A decision regarding the ISS future will depend to a great extent on the developing situation both in Russia and around it," he told the news agency in an interview on Friday, April 29 (opens in new tab). TASS also reported comments Rogozin had made a day earlier than his television interview, which seemed to suggest that any decision on the fate of the ISS project wasn't yet final. Rogozin's latest comments seem to imply that Russia could soon give notice and start its pullout from the ISS project.īut activities on the space station have been relatively normal since he made his initial comments, including the arrival of three Russian cosmonauts in mid-March, Live Science sister site reported (opens in new tab). aerospace company Northrop Grumman – meaning that Russia's involvement in the ISS might no longer be needed. ![]() Space experts have also noted that NASA is now testing its ability to keep the ISS in orbit with blasts from the engines of the Cygnus cargo spacecraft (opens in new tab), which is manufactured and launched by the U.S. Russia also controlled access to the ISS for several years because only its Soyuz flew there after the U.S Space Shuttle ended operations in 2011 but the advent of new passenger-carrying spacecraft like the SpaceX Dragon (opens in new tab) means that's no longer the case. has mainly been responsible for providing life support for the up to 10 people who lived aboard the ISS at any one time, and Russia has mainly been responsible for keeping the ISS in orbit, with regular blasts from the engines of the Soyuz spacecraft docked there. and Russia are the major partners on the ISS project, which was initiated after they cooperated on the last stages of the Mir space station in the 1990s, according to NASA (opens in new tab). The space station's mission has since been extended, although maintenance problems - especially on the Russian half of the space station - have increased in recent years (opens in new tab) and experts have warned that some of the ISS modules are getting old, NBC News reported (opens in new tab). The first modules of the International Space Station were boosted into orbit in 1998, and expected to last just 15 years. 15, 1998, the STS-88 mission touched down at NASA's Kennedy Space Center after an 11-day mission that delivered the first American-built module to begin construction of the International Space Station.
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