The International Space Station has continuously been home to humans for exactly 20 years now. That's amazing, isn't it?
Yet the International Space Station, like the rest of us, is aging. And it can't survive forever in orbit on its own, requiring a daily lift or fuel injection from visiting spacecraft. If such boosts end or anything else goes wrong, the lab will collapse sooner or later.
"While ISS is currently approved to operate through at least December 2024 by the international partner governments, from a technical standpoint, we have cleared ISS to fly until the end of 2028," NASA told Space.com. "Additionally, our analysis has not identified any issues that would preclude us from extending beyond 2028 if needed."
But the station's day will come someday. The facility is deteriorating and continuously at risk of space debris and micrometeorite impacts. If humans do not eliminate it, the dangers of space will.
It took 37 trips to transport most of the parts 350 km above Earth via NASA's space shuttle, which is around the same height as 3,850 football fields standing up at the end. It took more than ten years for astronauts to bring everything together in space!
In terms of when the ISS is finally going to return to Earth, we are not yet sure. But this will likely happen in five years.
When astronauts return from the ISS to Earth, they return to the same tiny spacecraft that carried them there. Three people will fit it and not anything more. And if we broke it into pieces, it's nowhere near big enough to fit into the ISS. So what will happen when we don't use the ISS anymore?
To be used again in a new space station, certain pieces could be retained in space. Most of the ISS, though, will return to Earth. To do this, to drive it closer to Earth, the mission controllers will use rockets attached to the station. Gravity would continue to draw it in until it is close enough.
It will eventually strike the atmosphere and explode into flames as it burns. This is due to a force called friction, which arises as two objects very quickly attempt to slide past each other. Friction makes it hot stuff.
It is expected to fall into an empty portion of the Pacific Ocean called the "Oceanic Pole of Inaccessibility" once the ISS moves through the atmosphere. This area, between New Zealand and Antarctica, is one of the emptiest locations on Earth. There are already other space stations down there, such as the Russian space station Mir, four kilometers below the surface of the sea.
