WASHINGTON: Nasa awarded SpaceX$ 843m to build a car worthy of pushing the Internation Space Station into Earth’s atmosphere for its planned death around 2030, it said on Wednesday, a task actually meant for Russia’s jets.
SpaceX did construct the US Deorbit Vehicle under its new Nasa deal, which will allow the space agency to deorbit the ISS without risk of crowded locations. Nasa will then take over the craft and handle the deorbiting activity.
Despite having been in operation for about 24 years, the football field-sized research lab, which is primarily led by the US and Russia, has been continuously staffed with government astronauts. However, Nasa and its foreign partners have since decided to set 2030 as their retirement age.
The ISS’s first segment was launched in 1998. Weighing 430, 000kg, ISS is by far the largest single structure ever built in space. According to previous observations of how other stations like Mir and Skylab collapsed upon atmospheric re-entry, Nasa engineers predict that the orbital outpost will collapse in three stages. First, the enormous solar arrays and the radiators that keep the orbital lab cool will fall, and then individual modules will fall from the station’s backbone structure’s truss. Finally, the truss and the modules themselves will tear apart. Much of the material will be vaporised, but large pieces are expected to survive. One of the most remote regions of the world and known as the graveyard of satellites and spaceships, Point Nemo is one of the reasons Nasa is pursuing this mission in the Pacific Ocean.
Russia has agreed to remain a partner through 2028, the date the Russian space agency Roscosmos believes its hardware can last, while the US, Japan, Canada, and the countries under the European Space Agency have committed to the space station partnership through 2030. Russian thrusters maintain the orbital altitude of the ISS, and US solar arrays maintain its power.
For the sake of keeping the US presence in the cosmic region, Airbus and Jeff Bezos ‘ Blue Origin have been funding early development of privately constructed space stations in low-Earth orbits to maintain their involvement after 2030.
