NASA said Wednesday that it has selected SpaceX to build the one-of-a-kind space vehicle meant to propel the now-decades-old International Space Station to a reentry at the end of its life without damaging anything on the ground.
The announcement came on the same day that the crew of the ISS had to unexpectedly board their capsules to wait for the outcome of a near collision with space debris from a satellite.
The ISS is already four years past its originally planned operational lifespan and has faced a raft of recent problems — air leaks from the structure have worsened and pieces of ISS-related space junk, including jettisoned parts of SpaceX Dragon capsules, have recently crashed to Earth after failing to burn up in the atmosphere. Also, the ballooning inventory of satellites in orbit has placed the ISS in added danger of a collision.
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In its announcement of SpaceX’s contract award, NASA expressed the fleeting nature of the new vehicle’s existence. Like the space station, the U.S. Deorbit Vehicle “is expected to destructively [break up] as part of the re-entry process.”
The agency provided details, in a white paper also published Wednesday, of the deorbiting plan along with an explanation of why it and its four international agency partners settled on deorbiting rather than other ideas, which were proposed by people who wanted to see at least some…
