The American space agency has been letting rumors spread for several years about a world without the ISS. The international space station is no longer really up to date and NASA’s Gateway program (which plans to launch a competitor to the ISS in orbit around the Moon) is not helping its affairs.
It was decided this week that the ISS would be dismantled and destroyed. The station will therefore not be sold to private companies, for space tourism, as has long been envisaged.
SpaceX hits the jackpot
Instead NASA decided to dig out the checkbook to find a clean decommissioning solution for the station. As is often the case in recent years when the American space agency calls for tenders, it is SpaceX which wins.
Elon Musk’s company should therefore receive no less of 843 million dollars to build the structure that will allow the ISS to “fall” from its orbit. The latter must be put in place by the company before 2030, the hypothetical date of the end of the life of the ISS.
In a message posted on the social network X, SpaceX reacted to this announcement from NASA. The company said it was honored by the trust placed by the American space agency. For its part, NASA is already preparing the sequel. The end of its press release is dedicated to the presentation of “small stations in low Earth orbit”.
A future without ISS
It was a possibility many space lovers feared, but the ISS is going to disappear. After more than 20 years of good and loyal service, the international space station, managed by 5 different agencies, will give up its place.
As NASA specifies in its press release, it and its main partners (Canada, Europe and Japan) will continue to finance missions to the ISS until 2030. Russia, which is the 5th force to occupy the station, must for its part stop paying maintenance costs from 2028.
The future will be made up of national stations
While the ISS is dying, the various government agencies will undoubtedly propose more or less ambitious projects for an orbiting space station in the coming years. China already has its own station in orbit around the Earth. Europe should in particular partner with NASA to continue to go into space and conduct experiments there.
Since 1998 and the opening of the ISS, more than 3,300 experiments have been carried out on the international space station. The ISS will have seen many astronauts, including 4 French: Claudie Haigneré (in 2001), Philippe Perrin (in 2002), Léopold Eyharts (in 2008) and Thomas Pesquet twice (2016-2020). Sophie Adenot is expected to fly for the first time in 2026.
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