The International Space Station’s 2030 return to Earth will end three decades of peaceful international collaboration—an era when space became integral to daily life.
Since November 2000, the football field-sized laboratory has continuously hosted astronauts orbiting at eight kilometers per second. With a new crew launching soon, ground personnel express nostalgia.
“The ISS is a cathedral to human cooperation across borders, languages and cultures,” said John Horack, former NASA manager and current Neil Armstrong Chair at Ohio State University. “For over 25 years, we’ve had people in space continuously—demonstrating how we can collaborate rather than conflict.”
Proposed after the Cold War, the ISS symbolized cooperation between rivals Russia and America. Despite tensions over Ukraine, station collaboration persists.
Return to Earth
The aging ISS has outdated equipment. NASA selected SpaceX last year to build a vehicle pushing the station into Earth’s atmosphere in 2030, where it will fragment over the Pacific Ocean at Point Nemo. After 2030, China’s Tiangong becomes Earth’s sole orbiting space station.
America now prioritizes privately-built, commercially-operated space stations. Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin and Axiom Space are developing commercial station plans, though the business model remains largely institutional as countries maintain interest in sending astronauts to orbit.
Scientific research remains “humanity’s objective,” said Lionel Suchet of France’s CNES. Whether space treaties hold when humans reach the Moon—with both US and China planning lunar bases—remains uncertain.
Moving Forward
For Horack, the ISS’s end feels sad, yet opens another era. “We must expand as humans in space-faring capacity and use space to generate outcomes for everyone everywhere.”
