SpaceX has revealed its plan to destroy the International Space Station, after three decades of service in Earth's orbit.
NASA has tasked Elon Musk's SpaceX with crashing the space station into the Pacific Ocean in 2030.
The private company will design a powerful spacecraft to propel the International Space Station onto a precise trajectory that will pull it out of orbit, causing most of it to burn up in Earth’s atmosphere. The parts that survive reentry will land in an uninhabited part of the ocean, which has yet to be determined.
Details of the mission were presented at a news conference on Wednesday, three weeks after NASA awarded SpaceX an $843 million contract to bring the space station down.
The International Space Station program manager, Dana Weigel, revealed that the space station will first "drift down" from its normal orbit about 12 to 18 months before the forced deorbit.
"Our plan is for the astronauts to leave about six months before the final return to the ISS, which is about 220 kilometers (136 miles) high," she added.
The ISS is now 400 km above the Earth, and the plan to end its mission is to deorbit it to an altitude of less than 180 km. Once the space station reaches this altitude, the new SpaceX spacecraft will perform a series of burns to get it to this final orbit, and four days later it will perform the final task: a “reentry burn.”
SpaceX's vehicle is essentially an upgraded version of the Dragon capsule, which is used to transport crew and cargo to the International Space Station.
SpaceX's orbital vehicle will be four times more powerful than the current Dragon spacecraft and contain six times more propellant, according to SpaceX.
No specific date has been set for deorbiting the ISS, although most international partners have committed to operations through 2030. Only Russia will leave earlier, perhaps around 2028.