The space station has little time left to live. In 2030, the ship must be completely dismantled before its uselessness allows it to hurtle uncontrollably toward Earth. To avoid this, the POT opened a contest and Elon Musk’s company, SpaceX, will be in charge of destroying the space station and lower it to the Pacific Ocean.
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The maneuver will be as spectacular as the project itself. International Space Station.
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The space station is an orbiting laboratory that is permanently manned 400 kilometers from Earth.
To understand how this event will take place and to know what the future of space exploration will be like, as envisioned by the POTAIRE spoke with the expert in space flights, the journalist and historian Diego Córdova, author of Footprints on the Moon.
“The space station, Like all space stations, it has an expiration date, as its components tend to age. It has been 26 years since the space station was first built until today. “It is a record for a station to be in operation for such a long time. The last record was held by the Russian space station Mir, which was in orbit for 16 years,” said Córdova.
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The components of any spacecraft in space not only age over time, but are also exposed to the hostilities of the Universe, such as micrometeorite impacts or space debris. The Hubble Space Telescope, which has been in space for more than 30 years, is an example of these impacts.
How do you take a space station out of orbit?
In theory, it is an easy task. In practice, it is a tough challenge.
“The procedure is the next. The station is docked to a spacecraft, an unmanned freighter, full of fuel, at the opposite point to where the space station is going. Why? Because once it is attached, “The freighter turns on the engines in the opposite direction to that in which the space station is going to slow it down so that it goes down and loses altitude,” Cordova explained. This allows the station to descend in a controlled manner and not fall anywhere on the planet, causing a disaster.
Where will the space station fall when its useful life ends?
The space station will end its useful life in the Nemo Point. “Point Nemo is located in the South Pacific Ocean and is the farthest point from any place where there is land. It’s a kind of spaceship graveyard“because satellites and cargo ships returning from the space station or previous space stations have fallen in that place, in the South Pacific Ocean. It is a place that is halfway between the Chilean and Australian coasts,” said the interviewee.
point nemo land inaccessible place
Point Nemo is located more than 1,600 kilometers equidistant from the coasts of three distant islands. To the north it has Ducie Island, to the northeast Motu Nui and to the south Maher Island.
SpaceX will be in charge of destroying the space station
The company of Elon MuskSpaceX will have the challenging task of lowering the International Space Station to him Nemo Point in 2030.
“What surprises me is that a company like SpaceX has won the mission of being the executioner of the space station. Surely this is going to happen in 2030. I always imagined that they were going to lower it like they lowered the Russian space station Mir, that is, with a Russian space freighter, the Progress. Obviously now it is not going to be like that, because they will surely want something with greater power since the space station is twice or even three times as big as Mir was back in 2001, which was when it was removed from the orbit. They should not want to have any problems with this, because the current space station is the largest space complex that man could build and we have to be very precise when lowering it,” said Córdova.
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Elon Musk won the NASA contest and will be in charge of lowering the space station through his company SpaceX.
When the space station re-enters Earth’s atmosphere, most of its parts will disintegrate.
“What still It was not reported whether the entire ship is going to fall or they are going to separate it by modules and they are going to fall. modules separately. That would be a logical idea, considering that it is a very large object,” said the space flight expert.
Will there be a new space station?
The private company Axiom Space – which is in charge of manufacturing the spacesuits for the next missions of the POT with astronauts to the Moon– is advancing in the construction of a private space station for scientists and tourists.
“This company Construction of the first modules of its commercial space station is well advanced, This will be a smaller space station that will be used to house some scientific experiments and also to sell its space to tourists who want to travel to the space station,” Córdova revealed.
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This commercial space station does not yet have a name, but it will be the next big project in low Earth orbit.
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NASA and ESA’s lunar space station will orbit the Moon and support human missions there as they work toward colonizing the Moon.
Pot.
“With this, the POT It is getting rid of what is low-orbit activity, the space station. It will not intervene, or very little or nothing, in what is the Axiom Space station or any other company that comes with other commercial space stations, because wants to dedicate all its efforts to deep space, to what is Sagebrush, the new lunar program,” the interviewee said.
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The POT is working hard to explore deep space and other planets with humans. Mars and beyond. He has all his resources combined in this. A new space station? It is contemplated, for what will be the new home of a group of humans, the Moonwith a space station that permanently orbits it called Gateway.
