Sunday (Nov. 2) marked the 25th anniversary of continuous human occupation of the International Space Station (ISS), which has carved out a spot in the history books as one of our species' grandest (and most expensive) technological achievements.
Don't save any confetti for a semicentennial celebration, however — the ISS is in its home stretch. NASA and its partners plan to deorbit the aging outpost toward the end of 2030, using a modified, extra-burly version of SpaceX's Dragon cargo capsule to bring it down over an uninhabited stretch of ocean.
And not just any stretch — the "spacecraft cemetery," a patch of the Pacific centered on Point Nemo, which is named after the famous submarine captain in Jules Verne's 1871 novel "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea."
That remoteness explains Point Nemo's appeal to mission planners, who have ditched several hundred big spacecraft there over the decades: If there's no land nearby, there's virtually no chance that chunks of falling, flaming hardware could harm people, buildings or other infrastructure. (You'd have to be a pretty unlucky sailor to get hit in the spacecraft cemetery).
And some pieces of the ISS are likely to survive its blazing reentry.
Source: www.space.com
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