NASA commissioned Elon Musk to build a ship that would destroy the International Space Station

For this purpose, it entrusted Space to the company. The contract amount is 843 million dollars -787 million euros-. Dubbed “America’s Deorbit Ship,” it will be a sort of space tug that will haul the 420-ton ISS so that it is destroyed upon return to Earth. The remains should fall in an uninhabited area of ​​the South Pacific Ocean. “Selecting a U.S. spacecraft to deorbit the International Space Station will help NASA and its international partners ensure a safe and responsible transition to low-Earth orbit when the station ends,” said Ken Bowersox, associate administrator for the Office of Space Operations.

Gateway, successor on the Moon

Since 1998, the football-field-sized ISS has hosted more than 3,300 microgravity experiments exploring biology, human physiology, physics and technology tests that are impossible on Earth. It has been operated by five space agencies: the Canadian Space Agency (CSA), the European Space Agency (ESA), the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), Russia’s Roscosmos and NASA itself.

While the ISS is the successor to Russia’s Mir station, which disintegrated in the Pacific Ocean in March 2001, several private companies are planning to launch their own space stations by 2030. One of them is the North American company Axiom. Also responsible for the spacesuits for the Artemis mission, which plans to return humans to the moon in 2026, it plans to launch the first module within two years. In the meantime, space agencies will focus their efforts on the Gateway, an infrastructure that will orbit the moon. Work on its construction is scheduled to begin in 2025.