The Most Remote Address in the Universe (That’s Still on Earth)

The Multiverse Employee Handbook defines “Point Nemo” as “the one location on Earth where being stood up for a date would be genuinely impressive, given that showing up at all requires either a spacecraft in distress or a boat with several weeks of provisions and a profound commitment to solitude.”

Situated at 48°52.6′S 123°23.6′W—coordinates that mean absolutely nothing until you realize they describe the spot on our planet farthest from any land in any direction—Point Nemo is 2,688 kilometers from the nearest shoreline. That’s roughly the distance from London to Cairo, except instead of pyramids at the end, there’s just more water. And beneath that water, about 4,000 meters down, lies humanity’s most exclusive retirement community: the spacecraft cemetery.

Named after Captain Nemo from Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (and the Latin word for “no one,” which is honestly more accurate), Point Nemo wasn’t discovered so much as calculated. In 1992, Croatian-Canadian survey engineer Hrvoje Lukatela solved what mathematicians call “the longest swim problem”—determining where on Earth you’d have to fall overboard to face the most discouragingly long paddle to shore. The answer was here, equidistant from three remote specks of land: Ducie Island in the Pitcairns, Motu Nui near Easter Island, and Maher Island off Antarctica.

Lukatela did this, reportedly, to demonstrate the capabilities of a software program he’d helped develop. The fact that his calculation would later become the preferred postal address for dying space stations was an unintended consequence—rather like inventing email and accidentally creating a medium for Nigerian princes to request wire transfers.

Why Here? A Brief History of Nowhere

The logic behind choosing Point Nemo as humanity’s spacecraft cemetery is beautifully simple: nobody lives there, nobody sails there, and if something falls from the sky at 180 miles per hour, you’d really prefer it happened somewhere devoid of insurance claims.

The area lies within the South Pacific Gyre, a massive rotating current system that essentially isolates it from nutrient-rich waters. This makes Point Nemo one of the least biologically productive regions on Earth—what marine scientists diplomatically call “a biological desert” and what everyone else calls “depressing.” When researchers sampled the waters in 2019, they found “probably the lowest cell numbers ever measured in oceanic surface waters.” Even microbes apparently prefer somewhere with better amenities.

This ecological desolation is, paradoxically, good news for spacecraft disposal. You can’t harm marine life that’s barely there to begin with. The remoteness also means no shipping lanes pass through—there’s nothing to see, nothing to do, and crucially, nothing for a re-entering satellite to inconveniently demolish.

And here’s the strangest fact about Point Nemo: the closest humans to it, at any given moment, are often aboard the International Space Station, orbiting 400 kilometers overhead. The nearest island is 2,688 kilometers away. The ISS passes by every 90 minutes. This means astronauts are frequently closer to this patch of ocean than anyone on land—a detail that takes on poignant significance when you consider that the ISS itself is scheduled to join the cemetery in 2030.

The Residents: A Who’s Who of Orbital Retirees

Since 1971, at least 263 spacecraft have made Point Nemo their final address—though “address” is perhaps too generous a term for a debris field scattered across hundreds of kilometers of ocean floor. The community includes Russian Progress cargo ships (over 140 of them, making Russia the largest single contributor to the graveyard), Japanese HTV resupply vehicles, European Automated Transfer Vehicles, and one extremely famous space station that checked in on March 23, 2001.

Mir remains the undisputed celebrity of the spacecraft cemetery. At 134 metric tons, the Soviet-then-Russian station spent 15 years in orbit, hosted 104 cosmonauts and astronauts, survived a fire, a collision, and a political system collapse, and ultimately came down in a carefully choreographed finale visible from Fiji. The deorbit required three precisely timed burns from a docked Progress spacecraft, dropping Mir from its orbit until atmospheric drag did the rest. About half its mass burned up during re-entry; the rest splashed into Point Nemo shortly after 6 AM GMT.

Controllers in the Russian flight control center, known by its Russian acronym TsUP, watched the monitor as an official statement declared that Mir had “ceased to exist.” Many of these operators had devoted their entire careers to Mir, working through all 86,331 orbits as the station traveled 2.2 billion miles. The graveyard gained its largest resident, and Russia’s most accomplished space station became deep-sea archaeology.

The Salyut stations preceded Mir into the cemetery, with six of the seven making controlled descents between 1971 and 1991. (Salyut 7, the exception, went down uncontrolled over Argentina in 1991 after increased solar activity puffed up the atmosphere unexpectedly—an exit that could charitably be described as “off-script.”) These stations represented the Soviet Union’s first generation of orbital laboratories, testing technologies that would eventually enable the ISS.

Then there are the support vehicles—the unglamorous workhorses of orbital logistics. Over 140 Russian Progress cargo ships have made the trip, having delivered supplies to Mir and the ISS before being loaded with trash and pointed toward oblivion. The European Space Agency contributed five Automated Transfer Vehicles (ATVs), including the “Jules Verne”—which, given Point Nemo’s namesake, must have appreciated the irony. Japan’s HTV vehicles added their own contributions, as did various satellites, rocket stages, and debris from multiple nations.

Notably absent from the guest list: China’s Tiangong-1 space station, which was supposed to arrive in 2018 but lost control before management could arrange proper directions. It ended up splashing down near American Samoa instead, several thousand miles from the intended destination—the spacecraft equivalent of showing up to the wrong retirement home.

The Process: How to Crash With Dignity

Contrary to what Hollywood suggests, deorbiting a spacecraft isn’t a matter of simply turning off the engines and hoping for the best. It requires precision timing, careful calculation, and the kind of confidence in mathematics that most people reserve for compound interest.

Here’s the basic procedure: A spacecraft in low Earth orbit travels at approximately 25,000 kilometers per hour, completing one lap every 90 minutes. To initiate controlled reentry, you need to slow it down—typically by about 1.3%, or roughly 325 kph. This doesn’t sound like much, but it’s enough to lower the orbit’s perigee (lowest point) until atmospheric drag takes over.

The deorbit burn happens about two-thirds of an orbit before the intended impact point. Timing is critical. Fire too early, and you’re aiming at the wrong patch of ocean. Fire too late, and congratulations, you’ve just endangered a populated area.

As the spacecraft descends, things become increasingly dramatic. At 100 kilometers altitude, atmospheric contact becomes “tough”—external components start tearing off. By 90 kilometers, heating creates a glowing plasma sheath around the vehicle. Shortly after, structural breakup occurs, and what was once a sophisticated piece of engineering becomes an expanding cloud of debris, much of which vaporizes before reaching the surface.

The parts that survive—typically dense materials like titanium, stainless steel, and aluminum—continue falling until they splash down across a footprint that can extend 1,000 miles long and dozens of miles wide. Airlines and shipping companies receive advance notice to avoid the area, though “the area” is already so remote that avoiding it is less an imposition and more a formality.

The Future: New Arrivals Expected

The spacecraft cemetery is about to receive its most significant resident yet. In 2030, the International Space Station—all 420 metric tons of it—is scheduled to make the trip.

The ISS will dwarf everything that came before. Mir weighed 134 tons; the ISS is more than three times heavier. It covers the area of an American football field. Its modules, trusses, and solar arrays represent the collective efforts of fifteen nations and over two decades of orbital construction. And by the end of this decade, all of it will be aimed at Point Nemo.

NASA has contracted SpaceX to build the U.S. Deorbit Vehicle—a modified Cargo Dragon with six times the normal propellant capacity and 46 Draco thrusters, capable of the sustained burns needed to wrestle a 420-ton structure through its final descent. The current plan calls for deorbit in January 2031, with debris splashing down in the Point Nemo region.

Some items may be evacuated first. NASA has mentioned ship’s bells, logbooks, and wall panels covered in mission patches as candidates for preservation—artifacts that could be returned on Dragon or Soyuz vehicles before the final descent. The rest will join Mir, the Salyuts, and several hundred cargo ships in what has become humanity’s largest underwater museum, curated by gravity and visited by no one.

Philosophical Observations From 4,000 Meters Below

There’s something oddly fitting about Point Nemo as the final resting place for spacecraft. These machines were built to explore the infinite emptiness of space, and they end up in the closest thing Earth has to infinite emptiness: a patch of ocean so remote, so devoid of life and activity, that it might as well be extraterrestrial.

The debris lies scattered across the seafloor like offerings to a god of entropy. Bits of Mir rest alongside Progress supply ships, European ATVs, Japanese HTVs, and the anonymous remains of satellites whose missions have long since faded from memory. None of it will ever be recovered. The depth is too great, the location too impractical, and the archaeological significance—while real—doesn’t justify the expense.

And so it accumulates. Every few months, another cargo ship makes the trip. Every decade or so, something larger arrives. The cemetery grows slowly, silently, in darkness that never ends and cold that never varies.

Above the surface, the water looks like any other patch of ocean. No marker indicates what lies beneath. No plaque commemorates the achievements of the hardware slowly corroding in the depths. The closest humans remain astronauts passing overhead, glimpsing the same coordinates their own station will eventually target.

Point Nemo is, in this sense, the universe’s most honest retirement community. It promises nothing. It delivers exactly what it advertises: a remote, quiet place where things that served their purpose can finally rest.

Which, when you think about it, isn’t so different from what any of us are looking for.

Guidelines for Your Own Controlled Deorbit

If you happen to be operating a spacecraft and wish to retire it responsibly:

  1. Start planning early. The ISS deorbit planning began years before the scheduled date. Orbital mechanics don’t care about your timeline.

  2. Pack extra fuel. Deorbit burns require significant propellant. Running out mid-maneuver creates the kind of excitement that makes international headlines.

  3. Coordinate with everyone. Airlines, shipping companies, governments, and international regulatory bodies all need advance notice that you’re about to drop something large from the sky.

  4. Aim carefully. Point Nemo is the target, but the debris footprint can span over 1,000 miles. “Close enough” has a different meaning at re-entry velocities.

  5. Accept that most of it will vaporize. What burns up in the atmosphere never reaches the cemetery. What survives is typically dense, heat-resistant components. The fancy stuff mostly becomes ionized gas.

  6. Don’t expect a receipt. Nobody inspects the debris. Nobody catalogs what arrives. The ocean floor accepts whatever sinks to it, and the current’s lack of questions is part of the arrangement.

Conclusion: Where Nobody Hears You Splash

Point Nemo will never have visitors—at least not intentional ones. In March 2024, British explorer Chris Brown reportedly became the first person to swim there, a distinction that required crossing 2,688 kilometers of open ocean to reach a spot with nothing to see and nowhere to stand.

But beneath the surface, the spacecraft cemetery continues its quiet expansion. Mir has been down there for over two decades now. The Salyuts are approaching their half-century anniversaries. And in a few years, the ISS will join them—the largest, most complex, most internationally collaborative structure ever built in orbit, reduced to debris settling on the seafloor.

There’s no memorial service. No tribute. No ceremony. Just the mathematics of orbital decay, the physics of atmospheric heating, and eventually, silence.

But perhaps that’s appropriate. These machines served their purpose. They carried humans into space, enabled research that changed our understanding of biology and physics, demonstrated that former enemies could share life support systems, and proved that even the most ambitious engineering eventually yields to entropy.

Point Nemo doesn’t judge. It simply receives.

And somewhere, 4,000 meters below the most remote surface on Earth, the artifacts of humanity’s reach for the stars lie in permanent darkness—testament to what we built, what we achieved, and what we eventually had to let go.

Want to hear more? 🎧 Listen to the full episode — The End of the ISS (and What Comes After)