Featured Image Credit: ANGELA WEISS/SCIEPRO/Getty Images
The plans for what will happen to Earth after Elon Musk finally destroys the $150 billion International Space Station have been revealed.
Musk’s space firm, SpaceX, is set to handle the destruction of the ISS and see it be brought back down to Earth in 2031.
The space station will have spent just over 30 years orbiting our planet as its work finally comes to an end.
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And there are some very specific plans for how it’ll be brought back into the atmosphere.
First of all, it will have to be a controlled descent to avoid any injuries to humans on Earth.
In order to achieve this, experts are aiming the space station at Point Nemo, which is the spot in the Pacific Ocean that is as far from land and civilization as possible.
It isn’t unusual for space debris to be brought down at Point Nemo, which has gained the nickname ‘the spacecraft cemetery’.
There are some concerns about what the side effects could be that our planet might suffer after bringing the ISS down.
One concern is that the space station will veer off course on the way back to Earth and end up somewhere completely different - and a lot more populated.
But even if all goes to plan, there are fears around dropping too much space waste into the ocean.
In fact, NASA has even admitted that some toxic or radioactive materials may even leak into the sea, which could have hazardous consequences.
And leaving the ISS in the Pacific Ocean might even be illegal.
This is according to a part of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea which states that all nations ‘have the obligation to protect and preserve the marine environment’.
That being said, there really isn’t much else SpaceX can do and there are no safer alternatives.
So, the plans to bring the ISS down into the ocean may have no choice but to go against the new Global Ocean Treaty that was agreed by the United Nations back in 2023.
The treaty agreed to aim to protect the marine environment in international waters from ‘human activity’ but so far hasn’t been ratified into international law.
In other space news, as the ISS reaches its final years in operation, two astronauts remain stranded as they wait to be picked up by a SpaceX crew.
Barry ‘Butch’ Wilmore and Sunita ‘Suni’ Williams have been stuck in space since June 2024 when their spacecraft experienced multiple faults.
