NASA has awarded SpaceX a multimillion-dollar contract to destroy the International Space Station (ISS) after its operational life ends in 2030.
The contract, potentially worth $843 million, will enable Elon Musk’s company to build a vehicle designed to safely destroy the orbiting laboratory to minimize the risk of it causing casualties on Earth.
The ISS is expected to function till 2030 as partner countries have agreed to fund it.
Partners To Work Together
NASA said that the safe deorbit of the ISS will be a collaborative effort among all five participating space agencies i.e. US, Canada, Russia, Japan and ESA.
NASA had already studied various proposals to dispose of the ISS including dismemberment and changing the ownership to a private entity but contracting the SpaceX comes as a surprise to many.
ISS History
The ISS, constructed starting in the 1980s and launched in the late 1990s and early 2000s, orbits the Earth every 90 minutes at an altitude just above 400 km (250 miles).
It has hosted thousands of scientific experiments, ranging from studies on the aging process in humans to the development of new materials.
