For 24 hours a day, seven days a week since November 2000, NASA and its international partners have sustained a continuous human presence in low-Earth orbit, including at least one American – a streak that will soon reach 25 years.
When viewed in the history of spaceflight, the International Space Station is perhaps one of humanity’s most amazing accomplishments, a shining example of cooperation in space among the United States, Europe, Canada, Japan and Russia. But all good things must come to an end.
The International Space Station’s emblem features the flags of the original signatory states.
CSA/ESA/JAXA/NASA/ROSCOSMOS
In 2030, the International Space Station will be deorbited: driven into a remote area of the Pacific Ocean.
I’m an aerospace engineer who has helped build a range of hardware and experiments for the ISS. As a member of the spaceflight community for over 30 years and a 17-year member of the NASA community, it will be hard for me to see the ISS come to an end.
Since the first pieces of the International Space Station were launched in 1998, the station has been home to significant research accomplishments across domains that include materials science, biotechnology, astronomy and astrophysics, Earth science, combustion and more.
Astronauts performing research inside the space station and payload experiments attached to the station’s exterior have generated many publications in peer-reviewed science journals. Some of them have advanced our understanding of thunderstorms, led to improvements in the crystallization processes of key cancer-fighting drugs, detailed how to grow artificial retinas in space, explored the processing of ultrapure optical fibers and explained how to sequence DNA in orbit.
The ISS’s microgravity environment has made it the optimal environment for a variety of scientific research projects.
NASA, CC BY
In total, more than 4,000 experiments have been conducted aboard the ISS, resulting in more than 4,400 research publications dedicated to advancing and improving life on Earth and helping forge a path for future space exploration activities.
The ISS has proven the value of conducting research in the unique environment of spaceflight – which has very low gravity, a vacuum, extreme temperature cycles and radiation – to advance scientists’ understanding of a wide range of important physical, chemical and biological processes.
Keeping a presence in orbit
But in the wake of the station’s retirement, NASA and its international partners are not abandoning their outpost in low-Earth orbit. Instead, they are looking for alternatives to continue to take advantage of low Earth orbit’s promise as a unique research laboratory and to extend the continuous, 25-year human presence some 250 miles (402 kilometers) above the Earth’s surface.
In December 2021, NASA announced three awards to help develop
