NASA plans to deorbit the International Space Station sometime around 2030, using a billion-dollar US Deorbit Vehicle (USDV) to sink and position it above a remote part of the southern Pacific Ocean. The USDV will then move the ISS into the lower atmosphere. Most of it will burn, but some of it will fall into the sea. These steps, writes Rebecca Heilweil, compose the best-case scenario for this gargantuan task. In this piece, part of Wired’s “Things Fall Apart” series, Heilweil details what could go horribly wrong.
But in the worst worst-case scenario, we don’t have any control. Instead, the station will crack through the atmosphere. Sure, many pieces will likely end up in the ocean, but some might hit people, possibly in a town or a city. The station could break apart across thousands of miles and multiple continents. This would be exceedingly hard to anticipate. As NASA puts it, “Calculating the probability of this penetration cascading into loss of deorbit capability has a very large range of variables, making predictions ineffective.”
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