The End of the ISS (and What Comes After)
Welcome to the Department of Legacy Asset Retirement, where humanity’s greatest collaborative construction project exists in a superposition of “vital international symbol” and “aging infrastructure liability” until someone checks the maintenance budget. In this examination of orbital decommissioning, we explore the controlled ending of twenty-five years of continuous human presence in space—and what comes next.
Our quantum-coherent correspondent guides us through Dax Rincewind’s visionary proposal to catch the station in a mitt the size of Luxembourg, the Square-Haired Boss’s unwavering faith in first principles, and intern Julia Chen’s discovery that Greenland is, in fact, populated. Meanwhile, the real science of ISS retirement reveals a story of metal fatigue, air leaks, diplomatic complexity, and the uncomfortable question of whether commercial replacements will be ready before the old station comes down.
Orbital Eviction Warning: This episode contains advanced concepts such as “controlled atmospheric reentry,” “spacecraft cemetery,” and “subscription-based access to low Earth orbit.” Listeners may experience side effects including nostalgia for international cooperation, concern about capability gaps, and the overwhelming urge to calculate how many sunrises you’d see in twenty-five years of continuous occupation (the answer is over 146,000, and yes, that’s more than your morning commute deserves).
From Cold War to Shared Kitchen: The Most Expensive Flatshare in History
The International Space Station exists because two empires collapsed into cooperation. In the early 1990s, the United States was developing Space Station Freedom while Russia had plans for Mir-2—until the Soviet Union dissolved and left one nation with world-class expertise and no funding, and another with funding and a design that kept ballooning in cost. The solution was elegantly pragmatic: merge the projects, add Europe, Japan, and Canada, and call it international cooperation.
The first module launched November 20th, 1998. Continuous human occupation began November 2nd, 2000. What followed was the largest construction project ever attempted off-planet: forty-plus assembly missions, multiple launch vehicles, five space agencies, three major languages, and somehow—over two decades—they built a structure the size of a football field that has kept humans alive continuously for twenty-five years.
Four hundred twenty metric tons. Two hundred ninety visitors from twenty-six countries. Over four thousand experiments. More than forty-four hundred research publications. A quarter of the world’s current population has never lived in a world without humans in orbit.
The Aging Problem: The ISS was originally scheduled for decommissioning in 2015. It’s now 2025, and certain components are older than some of the astronauts servicing them. The Zvezda module has been leaking air since 2019—not catastrophically, just persistently, in the way that a very old house settles and develops concerning gaps. Cosmonauts have found cracks in the Zarya module. NASA elevated the leak risk to “highest level” in June 2024. Crews now close hatches between segments during sleep periods. The metal is tired, the seals are degrading, and the station has been through over 150,000 orbital sunrises—each one a thermal cycle slowly weakening every joint and weld.
The Most Expensive Eviction in Human History
Unlike science fiction’s dramatic station destructions, the ISS gets the most bureaucratic ending possible: a scheduled retirement with paperwork, contracts, and international agreements about who’s responsible for which piece of falling debris.
SpaceX won the $843 million contract in June 2024 for the U.S. Deorbit Vehicle—essentially a heavily modified Cargo Dragon with six times the normal propellant capacity and forty-six Draco thrusters. Total program cost, including launch: approximately $1.5 billion. The sequence begins mid-2028, with the station’s orbit gradually lowered. The USDV arrives mid-2029. In 2030, four hundred twenty metric tons of human achievement makes its final descent.
Destination: Point Nemo, the oceanic pole of inaccessibility—2,500 kilometers from the nearest land, where spacecraft go to die. The seafloor is already littered with the remains of Mir, Progress cargo ships, and various other objects that outlived their usefulness. The ISS will break apart in three stages during reentry. Most will vaporize. Some debris will survive and join the graveyard.
What Might Be Saved: NASA has discussed preserving symbolic artifacts before the end: ship’s bells, mission logs, perhaps the panels covered in patches from every expedition. Tokens of what was accomplished before the entropy and the accountants had their say. But the model itself—five agencies, fifteen countries, shared investment and shared access—that can’t be bottled and stored. Some things don’t survive reentry.
Low Earth Orbit Becomes a Business Park
NASA’s new strategy can be summarized in four words: stop owning, start renting. The Commercial Low Earth Orbit Destinations program aims to make NASA a customer buying services rather than an operator maintaining infrastructure. Four major contenders are racing to replace the ISS:
Axiom Space leads the pack, planning to attach modules to the ISS before it retires, then separate and continue independently. Vast aims to launch Haven-1 in May 2026—a smaller demonstration station with Apple-designer aesthetics. Starlab, a partnership between Voyager Space, Airbus, and Northrop Grumman, targets 2029. And Orbital Reef, the Blue Origin and Sierra Space collaboration promising a “mixed-use business park in space,” has fallen behind schedule.
The timing problem is stark: NASA’s Inspector General warns commercial stations likely won’t be ready until well into the 2030s. The ISS deorbits in 2030. During any gap, China’s Tiangong—operational since 2021, continuously crewed, and notably not inviting American astronauts—would become the only permanently occupied station in low Earth orbit.
What’s Lost in Translation: The ISS represented collective ownership—shared investment, shared access, shared risk. What comes next is different. Commercial stations will be privately owned. Access will be purchased. The romantic era of the shared orbital homestead gives way to the practical era of the subscription-based business park. There’s nothing inherently wrong with commerce driving human expansion—it always has. But something changes when “we all live here” becomes “we rent space from the same landlord.” The ISS proved that former enemies could share life support systems. Whether commercial stations can replicate that spirit—or whether they’ll even try—remains to be seen.
Russia’s Interesting Decisions
In a development that surprises absolutely no one familiar with Roscosmos’s recent history, Russia has confirmed plans to reuse some aging ISS modules for their proposed Russian Orbital Service Station—the same modules with the air leaks, the cracks, and twenty-five years’ worth of accumulated bacteria and fungi that Russian scientists have warned include staphylococcus and streptococcus evolving in microgravity. Biomedical experts cautioned that transferring these modules would essentially seed the new station with what they termed “potentially pathogenic bacteria participating in the biodestruction of materials.” It’s the orbital equivalent of inheriting a house and discovering the previous owner ran an unlicensed petri dish collection in the basement. One might assume this would be disqualifying. One would be underestimating Roscosmos’s commitment to working with available resources.
Join us for this journey through the end of an era, where the Square-Haired Boss discovers that Dax Rincewind’s napkin math confused kilometers with miles, Julia Chen learns that whistleblowing leads to “meets expectations” performance reviews, and the real science of space station retirement reveals both the remarkable achievement we’re losing and the uncertain future we’re gaining. Because in the multiverse of human spaceflight, every orbital outpost exists in a superposition of “symbol of cooperation” and “line item in someone’s budget”—until the maintenance costs finally collapse the wavefunction.