Category Archives: Space Station

New U.S. sanctions on Russiawill encompass Russias space agency, Roscosmos, according to aspeech U.S. President Joe Biden gaveon Feb. 24, 2022.

In response to these sanctions, the head of Roscosmos on the same dayposted a tweet saying, among other things, If you block cooperation with us, who will save the ISS from an uncontrolled deorbit and fall into the United States or Europe?

The International Space Station has often stayed above the fray of geopolitics. That position is under threat.

Built and run by the U.S., Russia, Europe, Japan and Canada, the ISS has shown how countries can cooperate on major projects in space. The station has been continuously occupied for over 20 years and hashosted more than 250 people from 19 countries.

As a space policy expert, the ISS represents, to me, a high point of cooperation in space exploration. But forthe current crewof two Russians, four Americans and one German, things may be getting worrisome as tensions rise between the U.S. and Russia.

Several agreements and systems are in place to make sure that the space station can function smoothly while being run by five different space agencies. As of Feb. 24, there were no announcements of unusual actions aboard the station despite the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine. But the Russian government has brought the ISS into geopolitics before and is doing so again.

What came to be known as the International Space Station was first conceived on NASA drawing boards in the early 1980s. As costs rose past initial estimates,NASA officials invited international partnersfrom the European Space Agency, Canada and Japan to join the project.

When the Soviet Union collapsed at the end of the Cold War in the early 1990s, the Russian space programfound itself in dire straits, suffering from lack of funding and an exodus of engineers and program officials. To take advantage ofRussian expertise in space stationsand foster post-Cold War cooperation, the NASA administrator at the time, Dan Goldin,convinced the Clinton administrationto bring Russia into the program that was rechristened the International Space Station.

By 1998, just prior to the launch of the first modules, Russia, the U.S. and the other international partners of the ISS entered intomemorandums of understandingthat spelled out how major decisions would be made and what kind of control each nation would have over various parts of the station.

The body thatgoverns the operation of the space stationis the Multilateral Coordination Board. This board has representatives from each of the space agencies involved in the ISS and is chaired by the U.S. The board operates by consensus in making decisions on things like acode of conduct for ISS crews.

Even among international partners who want to work together, consensus is not always possible. If this happens, either the chair of the board can make decisions on how to move forward or the issue can be elevated to the NASA administrator and the head of the Russian space agency, Roscosmos.

While the overall operations of the station are run by the Multilateral Coordination Board, things are more complicated when it comes to the modules themselves.

The International Space Station is made of16 different segmentsconstructed by different countries, including the U.S., Russia, Japan, Italy and the European Space Agency. Under the ISS agreements, each country maintains control over how its modules are used. This includes the RussianZarya, which provides electricity and propulsion to the station, andZvezda, which provides all of the stations life support systems like oxygen production and water recycling.

The result is that ISS modules are treated legally as if they areterritorial extensionsof their countries of origin. While all crew onboard can theoretically be in and use any of the modules, how they are used must be approved by each country.

While the ISS has functioned under this structure remarkably well since its launch more than 20 years ago, there have been some disputes.

When Russian forces annexedthe Ukrainian territory of Crimea in 2014, the U.S. imposed economic sanctions on Russia. As a result, Russian officialsannounced that they would no longer launchU.S. astronauts to and from the space station beginning in 2020. Since NASA had retired the space shuttle in 2011, the U.S. was entirely dependent on Russian rockets to get astronauts to and from the ISS, and this threat could have meant the end of the American presence aboard the space station entirely.

While Russia did not follow through on its threat and continued to transport U.S. astronauts, the threat needed to be taken seriously. The situation today is quite different. The U.S. has been relying on private SpaceX rockets to transport astronauts to and from the ISS. This makes potential Russian threats to launch access less meaningful.

But the invasion of Ukraine does seem to have upped the intensity of geopolitical maneuvering involving the ISS.

The new U.S. sanctions are designed to degrade their aerospace industry, including their space program. Thetweet in responsefrom Dmitry Rogozin, the head of Roscosmos, explained that Russian modules are key to moving the station when it needs to dodgespace junkor adjust its orbit. He went on to say that Russia could eitherrefuse to move the station when needed or even crash it into the U.S., Europe, India or China.

Though dramatic, this is likely an idle threat due to both political consequences and the practical difficulty of getting Russian cosmonauts off the ISS safely. But I am concerned about how the invasion will affect the remaining years of the space station.

In December 2021, theU.S. announced its intention toextend operation of ISS operations from its planned end date of 2024 to 2030. Most ISS partners expressed support for the plan, but Russia will also need to agree to keep the ISS operating beyond 2024. Without Russias support, the station and all of its scientific and cooperative achievements may face an early end.

The ISS has served as a prime example for how nations can cooperate with one another in an endeavor that has been relatively free from politics. Increasing tensions, threats and more aggressive Russian actions including itsrecent test of anti-satellite weapons are straining the realities of international cooperation in space going forward.

This article first appeared on The Conversation.

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Russian invasion of Ukraine and resulting US sanctions threaten the future of the International Space Station - Stuff Magazines

The International Space Station is pictured from SpaceX's Crew Dragon Endeavour during a fly around on Nov. 8, 2021.

NASA

NASA's top official on human spaceflight addressed the agency's International Space Station partnership on Monday amid growing global tensions, saying the orbiting research laboratory is yet unaffected by Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

"We are not getting any indications at a working level that our [Russian] counterparts are not committed to ongoing operations," NASA Associate Administrator Kathy Lueders said during a news conference on Monday.

The NASA and Russian Roscosmos "teams are still talking together, we're still doing training together, we're still working together," Lueders added.

Currently, there are seven people on board the ISS: five astronauts four American and one German and two Russian cosmonauts. Lueders spoke during a news conference hosted byAxiom Space, which plans to launch its private Ax-1 crew mission to the ISS on March 30.

The ISS is physically divided into two sections: the United States Orbital Segment and the Russian Orbital Segment. The U.S. and Russia keep the research laboratory continuously staffed with astronauts and cosmonauts, with the roles of each nation's segment mutually dependent on the other ranging from life-support systems to thrusters that keep the ISS in orbit.

Russian cosmonauts Pyotr Dubrov and Anton Shkaplerov attach a new module to the country's segment of the International Space Station during a spacewalk on Jan. 19, 2022.

NASA

Simply put, the ISS' future in orbit absent a very expensive and challenging investment by NASA is dependent on the U.S. and Russia continuing to work together.

"It would be very difficult for us to be operating on our own," Lueders said.

While NASA expects to continue to operate the ISS until 2030, Roscosmos has not renewed its role beyond 2024. Dmitry Rogozin, the head of the Russian space agency, made a series of veiled threats on Twitter last week in response to U.S. sanctions saying "monstrous consequences" could include the ISS de-orbiting.

Lueders emphasized that NASA is looking at alternatives to "get more operational flexibility." Northrop Grumman is "offering up a reboost capability" to keep the ISS in orbit, Lueders said, and Elon Musk's SpaceX is looking at what the company can offer NASA to assist with the space station.

"Currently there is no plan" to replace Russia's role on the ISS, Lueders noted.

Beyond the long-term ISS partnership, crew and cargo transportation is top of mind. Lueders said NASA still plans to return astronaut Mark Vande Hei from the ISS, via Russia's Soyuz spacecraft, in about a month.

Additionally, while Roscosmos has yet to fly a cosmonaut on SpaceX's Crew Dragon, the agencies have been working toward an agreement that would see Russia's Anna Kikina fly on the U.S. spacecraft later this year.

More:
Top NASA official says space station partnership with Russia 'still working' despite Ukraine conflict - CNBC

To keep the ISS orbiting until 2031, the space agencies that maintain it need to periodically do something to counteract this drag force. The ISS doesnt have its own rocket engines, so it needs a reboost, or a push from a resupply craft. A reboost nudges the space station and increases its velocity. (Here is a bonus: My analysis of what its like to be an astronaut inside the ISS during a reboost, posted on the European Space Agencys blog.)

Would the ISS Burn Up on Reentry?

Although reentry can be a violent event and completely destroy many objects, its quite possible that something the size of the ISS would at least partially survive. As an example, pieces of Skylab made it through the atmosphere upon reentry in 1979 and hit the Earth as debris.

But anything that falls through the atmosphere gets super hot. Orbital objects are going really fast, and when they start to move through the atmosphere, they push the air in front of them, because that air gets in their way. Some of this air gets pushed to the side, but much of it is pushed forward. This is a problembecause there is already air there. Pressing more air into the same space causes a compression. You might have noticed while pumping up a bike tire that the tire gets hot as you pump more air in; its because its compressing the air already in the tube. The same thing happens as an object moves quickly through the atmosphere: The compressed air in front of it heats up, and the object itself gets hot. Like, melt stuff levels of hot.

Some spacecraft, like the Space Shuttle or the SpaceX Crew Dragon, have a heat shield, material that insulates the rest of the craft from all that hot air. But the ISS doesnt have a heat shield. So at the very least, parts of it would burn up on reentry.

The remaining debris might make it to a museum exhibit, but not one you could walk through.

Could We Get the ISS Down Without a Normal Reentry?

There's a difference between reentry and simply falling from space. If you just take an object up to an altitude of 400 kilometers and drop it, thats significantly different than reentry. Remember, objects in LEO are moving super fast, while a "dropped" object would start with a velocity of zero meters per second. Yes, the dropped object would speed up and get hotbut not nearly as hot as an object reentering from orbit.

So consider this: What if we used some rockets to stop the ISS in its orbit, and then brought it straight down in an effort to avoid the whole "burning up on reentry" problem?

Let's see what happens with some simple calculations. We can start with Newton's Second Law. This gives a relationship between a net force on an object and that object's acceleration. In one dimension, it looks like this:

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What It Would Take to Bring the ISS Back to Earth in One Piece - WIRED

Axiom Space aims to set a standard for future crews with its pioneering mission to the International Space Station (ISS) next month.

Axiom's Ax-1, the first all-private crewed mission to the orbiting lab, is scheduled to launch on March 30 and last for 10 days. Ax-1's four spaceflyers three paying customers and Axiom's Michael Lpez-Alegra, who's commanding the mission will fly inside a SpaceX Dragon capsule, which will lift off atop a Falcon 9 rocket.

"There have been individuals that have flown on government flights, but never a completely private flight [to the ISS] ... So we're very excited about this being the very first one of those," Michael Suffredini, president and CEO of Axiom, said during a livestreamed press conference Monday (Feb. 28).

Axiom ultimately aims to operate its own commercial space station, and the Houston-based company plans to launch a private module to the ISS in about two years to start building on that goal, Suffredini said.

He said Ax-1, however, will be the first of "probably hundreds of missions" during the buildout of the Axiom space station and of other missions for services in low Earth orbit. This first crew, he added, has an ambitious research agenda in mind that will not be focused on having the members "paste their nose on the window."

Photos: The first space tourists

The Ax-1 crewmembers are gearing up for such work as they enter the home stretch of their training, Lpez-Alegra, a former NASA astronaut, said during the same briefing.

For now, the spaceflyers are focused on refresher training and on "collection of data for the experiments that we do; generally they like doing some pre-flight, in-flight and post flight," he said. (This is especially true of medical experiments that focus on how spaceflyers' bodies change due to the rigors of spaceflight.)

Lpez-Alegra added that the Ax-1 training has been broadly similar to that he experienced when preparing for NASA missions. "Our focus is always safety and mission success, and that's really unchanged," he said.

Lpez-Alegra noted that his crew is seeking to be "standard bearers" for how private astronauts should conduct themselves on the ISS, seeking to "set the bar very, very high" because they know they will be guests on the orbiting complex.

Lpez-Alegra said his relationships with space tourists in the past, when he was a NASA astronaut, were positive. But he also recognized the potential for disruption. "We're super sensitive to that, and we think that's a very good example to be setting for future crews. Everybody on the crew is ... very dedicated, very committed, very professional in this, and we really are taking this very, very seriously. It's not tourism."

The International Space Station: Facts, history and tracking

The crew's time will be largely spent on a "collection" of life science and technology demonstrations, Christian Maender, Axiom's director of in-space research and manufacturing, said during the press conference. More announcements will be forthcoming in future weeks, he added.

The medical investigations will include work with stem cells and cardiac health, and one of the key tech demonstrations will be in-space spacecraft assembly, which proponents hope reduces the costs involved with getting equipment up and running in orbit. (Officials noted that the work may also generate some good videos for public engagement.)

Looking ahead to the Axiom space station, Suffredini said the planned launch date for the first module will be in September 2024. The company should wrap up critical design reviews for the first two modules this summer, he added.

Among the modules that Axiom plans to launch is a research facility, which will help take over some of the in-orbit science responsibilities when the "ISS is ready to retire ... about a year before that happens," Suffredini.

Suffredini, who was NASA's International Space Station program manager from 2005 to 2015, said that it's possible Axiom's modules could support a mission as soon as 2028 if necessary. "We do have some flexibility there," he said.

Axiom will launch its modules to the ISS initially. The private facility will eventually detach from the ISS and become a bona fide space station of its own.

NASA wants to extend the ISS agreement to 2030, but that is pending pledges from the various partners that make up the multinational pact to extend beyond the current end date of 2024.

The largest partner, Russia, is now facing severe international sanctions in space (among many other industries) due to a military invasion of Ukraine last week. The invasion has been condemned by the United States and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), among others; many NATO partners have also implemented industry and financial sanctions.

During Monday's call, Kathy Lueders, NASA's associate administrator of space operations, emphasized that NASA and Russia continue to work together as usual on the ISS and are committed to continuing that relationship.

"We as a team are operating just like we were operating three weeks ago," she said. "The teams, the controllers are still talking together. Our teams are still talking together. We're still doing training together. We're still working together."

Follow Elizabeth Howell on Twitter@howellspace. Follow us on Twitter@Spacedotcomor Facebook.

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Ax-1, 1st all-private crewed flight to ISS, aims to blaze trail for future missions - Space.com

Four NASA astronauts, two Russian cosmonauts and one European astronaut are currently on the space station.

Scott Pace, who served as executive secretary of the space council under President Donald Trump and is now the director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University, said the space station has been largely isolated from political events.

Its possible to imagine a break with Russia that would endanger the space station, but that would be at the level of a dropping diplomatic relations, said Pace. That would be something that would be an utterly last resort so I dont really see that happening unless there is a wider military confrontation.

The space station,an international partnership of five space agencies from 15 countries, including Canada, several countries in Europe, Japan, Russia and the United States, launched in 1998 and morphed into a complex thats almost as long as a football field, with eight miles of electrical wiring, an acre of solar panels and three high-tech labs.

It markedtwo decades of people continuously living and working in orbitin 2020.

The first crew American Bill Shepherd and Russians Sergei Krikalev and Yuri Gidzenko blasted off from Kazakhstan on Oct. 31, 2000. Two days later, they swung open the space station doors, and clasped their hands in unity.

The three astronauts got along fine but tension sometimes bubbled up with the two mission controls, in Houston and outside Moscow.

Shepherd, during a NASA panel discussion with his crewmates, said he got so frustrated with the conflicting marching orders that he insisted they come up with a single plan.

Russia kept station crews coming and going after NASAs Columbia disaster in 2003 and after the space shuttles retired in 2011.

In 2020,SpaceX ended a nine-year launch drought for NASAand became the first private company to launch Americans to the space station.

It is a way of undertaking common endeavors but that power is not infinite and terrestrial conflicts on Earth can still get in the way, said Pace. Space is ever more critical to our daily life and its something everybody should be aware of.

Earlier this year, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg, who chaired a meeting of the NATO-Russia Council in Brussels, said he was keen to discuss ways to prevent dangerous military incidents or accidents involving Russia and the Western allies,reducing space and cyber threats, as well as setting limits on missile deployments and other arms control initiatives.

There have been concerns raised in Congress about the impact that conflict over Ukraine could have on the International Space Station.

Lawmakers have specifically exempted space cooperation from previous sanctions and can be expected to make similar arguments against targeting it as the administration considers its next steps over Ukraine.

On Wednesday,Russia began evacuating its embassy in Kyiv, and Ukraine urged its citizens to leave Russia.

Russian lawmakers authorized President Vladimir Putin to use military force outside his country and President Joe Biden and European leaders responded by slapping sanctions on Russian oligarchs and banks.

Both leaders signaled that an even bigger confrontation could lie ahead.

Putin has yet to unleash the force of the 150,000 troops massed on three sides of Ukraine, while Biden held back on the toughest sanctions that could cause economic turmoil for Russia but said they would go ahead if there is further aggression.

The sanctions underscored the urgency felt by Western nations to blunt the conflict.

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Ex-official: Space station 'largely isolated' from tensions - The Missourian

Following is a summary of current science news briefs.

NASA shrugs off Roscosmos leader's rant over U.S. sanctions and space station

NASA on Friday shrugged off public comments from the head of its Russian counterpart suggesting U.S. sanctions imposed against Moscow over the Ukraine crisis could "destroy" U.S.-Russian teamwork on the International Space Station (ISS). Dmitry Rogozin, director-general of Russian space agency Roscosmos, took to Twitter on Thursday denouncing new constraints on high-tech exports to Russia that U.S. President Joe Biden said were designed to "degrade their aerospace industry, including their space program."

Fossil of dinosaur with hard head and tiny arms found in Argentina

Scientists have unearthed in Argentina the remains of a previously unknown species of meat-eating dinosaur that lived about 70 million years ago that had puny arms and may have used its powerful head to ram its prey. The fossil skull of the Cretaceous Period dinosaur, named Guemesia ochoai, was discovered in Argentina's northwestern Salta province. The researchers said it likely belongs to a carnivorous group of dinosaurs called abelisaurs, which walked on two legs and possessed only stub-like arms, even shorter than those of North America's Tyrannosaurus rex.

(With inputs from agencies.)

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Science News Roundup: NASA shrugs off Roscosmos leader's rant over U.S. sanctions and space station; Fossil of dinosaur with hard head and tiny arms...

NASA laid out the details of how it plans to retire the International Space Station (ISS) in an official transition plan for the station that was sent to US Congress this week.

The US space agency intends to retire the landmark research outpost within the next eight to nine years, plunging the massive structure into a remote part of the Pacific Ocean, nicknamed Spacecraft Cemetery.

How will the ISS retire?

NASA is aiming for the space station's re-entry into the Earth's atmosphere in January 2031, according to the agency's budget estimates.

The ISS mission control will lower its altitude, before performing a final maneuver to ensure it lands in the "South Pacific Oceanic Uninhabited Area (SPOUA)," in an area known as Point Nemo.

"ISS operators will perform the ISS re-entry burn, providing the final push to lower ISS as much as possible and ensure safe atmospheric entry," according to the transition plan.

A symbol of international cooperationThe space station travels at a speed of five miles per second (8 kilometers per second), orbiting Earth every 90 minutes at a distance of 400 km (248 miles) above the surface.

It is run by five space agencies with 15 countries involved, making it a symbol of decades of international cooperation.

The first module of the ISS was launched into orbit in November 1998, and three years later, the first crew took up residence there.

Since then, the space station has served as a hub for scientific research and has been staffed by a rotating crew of three to six astronauts.

Commercial space stationsNASA has described the retirement of the ISS as a "transition to commercial services."

The space station will be replaced by "one or more commercially-owned and -operated" space platforms, NASA said in a statement.

"The private sector is technically and financially capable of developing and operating commercial low-Earth orbit destinations, with NASA's assistance," Phil McAlister, director of commercial spaceflight at NASA headquarters.

"We look forward to sharing our lessons learned and operations experience with the private sector to help them develop safe, reliable, and cost-effective destinations in space," he said.

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International Space Station to retire by crashing into Pacific Ocean by 2031 | Times of Oman - Times of Oman

ATLANTA (AP) Tensions in eastern Ukraine and heightened Western fears of a Russian invasion should not have a significant impact on the International Space Station or U.S.-Russia cooperation in space, the former head of the National Space Council told The Associated Press.

Scott Pace, who served as executive secretary of the space council under President Donald Trump and is now the director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University, said the space station has been largely isolated from political events.

Its possible to imagine a break with Russia that would endanger the space station, but that would be at the level of a dropping diplomatic relations, said Pace. That would be something that would be an utterly last resort so I dont really see that happening unless there is a wider military confrontation.

WATCH: Can asteroids be veered away from Earth? New NASA spacecraft aims to find out

The space station, an international partnership of five space agencies from 15 countries, including Canada, several countries in Europe, Japan, Russia and the United States, launched in 1998 and morphed into a complex thats almost as long as a football field, with eight miles of electrical wiring, an acre of solar panels and three high-tech labs.

It marked two decades of people continuously living and working in orbit in 2020.

The first crew American Bill Shepherd and Russians Sergei Krikalev and Yuri Gidzenko blasted off from Kazakhstan on Oct. 31, 2000. Two days later, they swung open the space station doors, and clasped their hands in unity.

The three astronauts got along fine but tension sometimes bubbled up with the two Mission Controls, in Houston and outside Moscow.

Shepherd, during a NASA panel discussion with his crewmates, said he got so frustrated with the conflicting marching orders that he insisted they come up with a single plan.

Russia kept station crews coming and going after NASAs Columbia disaster in 2003 and after the space shuttles retired in 2011.

It is a way of undertaking common endeavors but that power is not infinite and terrestrial conflicts on Earth can still get in the way, said Pace. Space is ever more critical to our daily life and its something everybody should be aware of.

Earlier this year, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg, who chaired a meeting of the NATO-Russia Council in Brussels, said he was keen to discuss ways to prevent dangerous military incidents or accidents involving Russia and the Western allies, reducing space and cyber threats, as well as setting limits on missile deployments and other arms control initiatives.

There have been concerns raised in Congress about the impact that conflict over Ukraine could have on the International Space Station.

Lawmakers have specifically exempted space cooperation from previous sanctions and can be expected to make similar arguments against targeting it as the administration considers its next steps over Ukraine.

On Wednesday, Russia began evacuating its embassy in Kyiv, and Ukraine urged its citizens to leave Russia.

Russian lawmakers authorized President Vladimir Putin to use military force outside his country and President Joe Biden and European leaders responded by slapping sanctions on Russian oligarchs and banks.

Both leaders signaled that an even bigger confrontation could lie ahead.

Putin has yet to unleash the force of the 150,000 troops massed on three sides of Ukraine, while Biden held back on the toughest sanctions that could cause economic turmoil for Russia but said they would go ahead if there is further aggression.

The sanctions underscored the urgency felt by Western nations to blunt the conflict.

Four NASA astronauts, two Russian cosmonauts and one European astronaut are currently on the space station.

AP Diplomatic Writer Matthew Lee in Washington contributed to this report.

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International Space Station largely isolated from tensions over Ukraine - PBS NewsHour

It took NASA and its partners nearly four dozen trips between 1998 and 2010 to haul the roughly 900,000 pounds worth of various modules into orbit that make up the $100 billion International Space Station. But come the end of this decade, more than 30 years after the first ISS component broke atmosphere, the ISS will reach the end of its venerable service life and be decommissioned in favor of a new, privately-operated cadre of orbital research stations.

NASA

The problem NASA faces is what to do with the ISS once its been officially shuttered, because its not like we can just leave it where it is. Without regular shipments of propellant reactant to keep the station on course, the ISS orbit would eventually degrade to the point where its forward momentum would be insufficient to overcome the effects of atmospheric drag, subsequently plummeting back to Earth. So, rather than wait for the ISS to de-orbit on its own, or leave it in place for the Russians to use as target practice, NASA will instead cast down the station from upon high like Vader did Palpatine.

NASA is no stranger to getting rid of refuse via atmospheric incineration. The space agency has long relied on it in order to dispose of trash, expended launch vehicles, and derelict satellites. Both Americas Skylab and Russias Mir space stations were decommissioned in this manner.

Skylab was Americas first space station, for the whole 24 weeks it was in use. When the final 3-astronaut crew departed in early 1974, the station was boosted one last time to 6.8 miles further out in a 289-mile graveyard orbit. It was expected to remain there until the 1980s when increased solar activity from the waxing 11-year solar cycle would eventually drag it down into a fiery reentry. However, astronomers miscalculated the relative strength of that solar event, which pushed up Skylabs demise to 1979.

In 1978, NASA toyed with the idea of using its soon-to-be-completed Space Shuttle to help boost Skylab into a higher orbit but abandoned the plan when it became clear that the Shuttle wouldnt be finished in time, given the accelerated reentry timetable. The agency also rejected a proposal to blow the station up with missiles while still in orbit. The station eventually came down on July 11th, 1979, though it didnt burn up in the atmosphere as quickly as NASA had predicted. This caused some rather large pieces of debris to overshoot the intended Indian Ocean target South-Southeast of South Africa and instead land in Perth, Australia. Despite NASAs calculations of a 1 in 152 chance that a piece of the lab could hit someone during its de-orbit, no injuries were reported.

Mir's deorbit went much more smoothly. After 15 years of service it was brought down on March 23rd, 2001, in three stages. First, its orbit was allowed to degrade to an altitude of 140 miles. Then, the Progress M1-5 spacecraft basically an attachable rocket designed specifically to help deorbit the station docked with the Mir. It subsequently lit its engine for a little over 22 minutes to precisely put the Mir down over a distant expanse of the Pacific Ocean, east of Fiji.

As for the ISS oncoming demise, NASA has a plan or at least a pretty good idea for whats going to happen. "We've done a lot of studies," Kirk Shireman, deputy manager of NASA's space station program, told Space.com in 2011. "We have found an orbit and a change in velocity that we believe is achievable, and it creates a debris footprint thats all in water in an unpopulated area."

According to NASA standards specifically NASA-STD-8719.14A, Process for Limiting Orbital Debris the risk of human casualty on the ground is limited to less than 1 in 10,000 (< 0.0001). However, a 1998 study conducted by the ISS Mission Integration Office discovered that an uncontrolled reentry would carry an unacceptable casualty probability of between .024 to .077 (2 in 100 to 8 in 100). A number of controllable decommissioning alternatives have been discussed over the decades, including boosting the ISS farther into orbit in the event of an unexpected evacuation of the stations crew.

"We've been working on plans and update the plans periodically," Shireman continued. "We dont want to ever be in a position where we couldnt safely deorbit the station. It's been a part of the program from the very beginning."

Beginning about a year before the planned decommissioning date, NASA will allow the ISS to begin degrading from its normal 240-mile high orbit and send up an uncrewed space vehicle (USV) to dock with the station and help propel it back Earthward. The ultimate crew from the ISS will evacuate just before the station hits an altitude of 115 miles, at which point the attached USV will fire its rockets in a series of deorbital burns to set the station into a capture trajectory over the Pacific Ocean.

NASA has not yet settled on which USV will be employed. A 2019 plan approved by NASAs safety council, ASAP, relied on Roscosmos to outfit and send up another Progress spacecraft to do what it did for the Mir. However, that vehicle might not actually be available when the ISS is set to come down because Russias commitment to the ISS program terminates in 2024. In April of last year, Russian state media began making noise that the country would abandon the station entirely by 2025, potentially stripping parts from this station to reuse in its upcoming national station and leaving the ISS without a reliable way to break orbit. The ESAs Automated Transfer Vehicle or NASA's Orion Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle, though still in development, are both potential alternatives to the Progress.

NASA is continuing to work with its international partners to ensure a safe deorbit plan of the station and is considering a number of options," spokeswoman Leah Cheshier told UPI via email in 2021, declining to elaborate on what those options might entail but adding that any deorbiting mission would be "shared by the ISS partnership and is negotiation-sensitive at this time."

The fall of the ISS is sure to be a spectacle on par with the international hubbub surrounding Skylabs demise, but is still nearly a decade away and there is plenty of science still left to do. According to the January 2022 International Space Station Transition report:

The ISS is now entering its third and most productive decade of utilization, including research advancement, commercial value, and global partnership. The first decade of ISS was dedicated to assembly, and the second was devoted to research and technology development and learning how to conduct these activities most effectively in space. The third decade is one in which NASA aims to verify exploration and human research technologies to support deep space exploration, continue to return medical and environmental benefits to humanity, continue to demonstrate U.S. leadership in LEO through international partnerships, and lay the groundwork for a commercial future in LEO.

More than half of the experiments performed aboard the ISS nowadays are for non-NASA users, according to the report including nearly two dozen commercial facilities hundreds of experiments from other government agencies, academia, and commercial users to return benefits to people and industry on the ground. This influx of orbital commercial activity is expected and being actively encouraged to further increase over the next few years until humanity can collectively realize Jeff Bezos dream of building a low Earth orbit mixed-use business park.

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How to incinerate the International Space Station - Engadget

A new Russian cargo ship will blast off today (Feb. 14) with tons of supplies and equipment for the Expedition 66 crew of the International Space Station. Here's how you can watch it live.

A Soyuz rocket from the Russian space agency Roscosmos is scheduled to launch from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan at 11:25 p.m. EST Monday (0425 GMT or 9:25 a.m. local time on Tuesday, Feb. 15). Coverage will start running at 11 a.m. EST (0400 GMT) on NASA Television, the NASA app, NASA social media and here at Space.com.

The ship will take a relatively slow three-day journey to the International Space Station before docking on Thursday (Feb. 17), which will also be carried live. NASA TV's live coverage of the cargo ship's arrival should begin at 1:30 a.m. EST (0630 GMT) and the Progress should link up with the Russian Poisk docking compartment at 2:06 a.m. EST (0806 GMT).

Related: How Russia's Progress spaceships work (infographic)

NASA stated that the spacecraft will carry three tons of food, fuel and supplies to the International Space Station and that the departure date for Progress 80, as the spacecraft is called, will be determined by Roscosmos at a later date.

Roscosmos announced days ago it plans to shorten Progress deliveries to a single-orbit, two-hour journey to the orbiting lab. Should early testing go to plan, implementation is expected in 2023.

Starting in 2018, many Progress launches were able to get to the station in just two orbits or three hours. But the timing of the launches and space station arrivals is subject to many factors, such as the activities of other spacecraft docked to the space station.

Progress is the main spacecraft by which Russia delivers supplies to its crews on the International Space Station, following the work of previous Progress variants that supplied earlier stations such as Salyut 6 and Mir. Progress was first developed in the 1970s under the now-defunct Soviet Union.

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