Where do you dump a football-field sized, 420 metric ton space station when it’s no longer hosting astronauts? At the bottom of the ocean, of course.
Outlined by the folks at NASA, that’s the current plan to scuttle the International Space Station: a two-phase process which involves launching a custom-built SpaceX spacecraft to push the iconic installation down from its orbit, where it will tumble back down to Earth and — if all goes according to plan — splash down in the south Pacific Ocean.
Ocean researchers, however, aren’t as gungho as their astrophilic counterparts. Speaking to Space.com, president of The Ocean Foundation Mark Spalding said the plan to dump the habitat into the drink “raises serious concerns for ocean health that the space community has not adequately grappled with.”
As part of the decomissioning, NASA suggested it would target a landing near Point Nemo, the farthest spot on the ocean from any land. Point Nemo is infamously known as the planet’s “spacecraft cemetery,” home to hundreds of decommissioned spacecraft.
Even as remote a resting place as Point Nemo is, Spalding says there’s a “troubling structural gap in international law that the ISS de-orbit throws into sharp relief.”
It’s also not universally accepted that destroying the ISS is the only option. In a recent report flagged by Space.com, the US Government Accountability Office suggested that NASA could instead convert it into a kind of rentable module, a habitat open to commercial space companies to attach their own equipment to.
As for the current plan, there remain many unanswered questions about the impact the ISS would have when it comes to rest on the ocean floor.
“That is deeply troubling for a structure the size of a football field. We do know that not everything burns up on reentry,” Spalding told Space.com. “That uncertainty is itself the problem.”
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