SpaceX wins US$843 million to help Nasa destroy International Space Station
- The firm will build a vehicle capable of pushing the orbiting facility back down to Earth’s atmosphere when it’s time to retire the station
Nasa awarded SpaceX US$843 million to build a vehicle capable of pushing the International Space Station into Earth’s atmosphere for its planned destruction around 2030, it said on Wednesday, a task originally meant for Russia’s thrusters.
Under its new Nasa contract, SpaceX will build what the space agency called the US Deorbit Vehicle to deorbit the space station and avoid risks to populated areas, with Nasa taking ownership of the craft and handling the deorbiting operation.
The football field-sized research lab, led primarily by the United States and Russia, has been continuously staffed with government astronauts during its some 24 years of operation, but its ageing components have led Nasa and its foreign partners to set 2030 as a planned retirement date.
The US, Japan, Canada and the countries under the European Space Agency have committed to the space station partnership through 2030, while Russia has agreed to remain a partner through 2028, the date through which the Russian space agency Roscosmos believes its hardware can last.
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The scientific cooperation aboard the ISS, orbiting some 400km (250 miles) above, has survived years of geopolitical strife on Earth, including Russia’s war in Ukraine that has ended nearly all other cooperative ties with the Western world.
