What Happens to the ISS After 2030? The Deorbit Plan

The International Space Station has been continuously inhabited since November 2000, but it will not fly forever. NASA and its partners plan to operate the station until about 2030, after which it will be retired and brought down in a controlled way. Until then you can keep watching it live on our real-time dashboard.

Why it has to come down

The station is aging. Its oldest modules have been in orbit since 1998, exposed to constant temperature swings, radiation, and micrometeoroid impacts. Structures fatigue, seals wear, and maintenance grows more demanding every year. Rather than risk an uncontrolled reentry once systems fail, the partners want to end the mission on their own terms while everything still works.

The controlled deorbit

Leaving a 420,000 kilogram structure to fall on its own would be dangerous, because large pieces could survive reentry and reach the surface. Instead, the plan is a guided deorbit:

1. The station's altitude is gradually lowered as natural drag pulls it down.
2. A dedicated spacecraft, the US Deorbit Vehicle being developed with SpaceX, docks to the station.
3. It fires its engines to steer the ISS into a steep, controlled reentry.
4. The station breaks up over the ocean, with any surviving debris aimed at Point Nemo, the remote spot in the South Pacific that is farther from land than anywhere else on Earth.

Point Nemo is already the traditional graveyard for retired spacecraft, chosen precisely because there are no people or shipping lanes nearby.

What comes next

The end of the ISS is not the end of humans living in low Earth orbit. NASA is funding several commercial space stations designed to take over, including Axiom Station, Orbital Reef, and Starlab. The goal is for these privately operated outposts to be running before the ISS comes down, so there is no gap in human presence in orbit.

• Planned retirement: around 2030
• Deorbit method: controlled reentry using a dedicated deorbit vehicle
• Splashdown zone: Point Nemo, South Pacific
• Successors: commercial stations such as Axiom, Orbital Reef, and Starlab

A fitting end

For over 30 years the ISS has been a laboratory, an observatory, and a symbol of what nations can build together. Its controlled return will be one last engineering challenge for a machine that spent its whole life solving them. To appreciate the scale of what is being retired, take a look at ISS by the numbers or the history of the station.