NASA and SpaceX officials said recently that the business is upgrading its cargo Dragon spacecraft to bring the International Space Station (ISS) into a controlled return to Earth and break up over an unpopulated ocean area when the lab is ultimately decommissioned in the 2030s.
To guarantee the proper location and orientation of the International Space Station (ISS) ‘s re-entry into the atmosphere, a specially built spacecraft called the International Space Station Deorbit Vehicle (DV) is used. NASA gave SpaceX a contract to construct the DV, which might be worth as much as $843 million.
A total of 46 Draco rocket engines, with 30 of them placed in an extended trunk portion to perform most of the deorbit operations, will be powered by 35,000 pounds of fuel aboard the ISS DV.
Launched around 1.5 years before the last re-entry burn, the ISS DV will continue to carry the last crew members until the lab is lowered to an altitude of approximately 205 miles due to rising drag in the very high atmosphere and frequent thruster firings about six months prior to the last re-entry operation.
At 140 miles, the DV will conduct a sequence of burns to prepare for the last deorbit and, four days later, the final re-entry burn. When attachments have broken off and burned, the enormous laboratory power truss will burn up.
Although the exact location has not been announced, there are uninhabited splashdown zones in remote parts of the southern Pacific Ocean.
According to Sarah Walker, SpaceX’s director of Dragon mission management, the deorbit vehicle will need four times the electrical power production and storage capacity of the current Dragon spacecraft and six times the useable fuel to accomplish a perfectly targeted descent.
Because no object as large as the ISS has ever re-entered Earth’s atmosphere before, NASA is not taking any chances, even if the likelihood of a collision in a populated region is low.
NASA and its station partners, the space agencies of Japan, Europe, Canada, and Russia, intend to break up the lab over an empty ocean by intentionally launching it into Earth’s atmosphere after its mission is over.
