NASA has ordered SpaceX to design a bespoke spacecraft that will safely deorbit the International Space Station in the 2030s, crashing it over an uninhabited ocean area. In its final fall, the ISS Deorbit Vehicle would be an exemplary adaption of the SpaceX Dragon spacecraft that would be needed to guide the ISS down purposefully so that remains from its debris could not cause any harm in inhabited places on Earth.
The ISS itself is a massive 218 feet long and 310 feet wide with its solar arrays extended, and it travels at 17,100 mph. To control that fall, the DV will carry 35,000 pounds of propellant and 46 Draco rocket engines, 30 of which will be contained within an extended or stretched-out trunk section. Noted Dana Weigel, the ISS program manager at the Johnson Space Center, that DV would be launched about 18 months before the final re-entry burn, docking to ISS to initiate a series of checkouts and controlled altitude reductions.
The final crew would stay on board until the ISS reaches an altitude of about 205 miles, six months before the ultimate re-entry. At 140 miles, the DV will conduct a series of burns to position the ISS for its final descent; the whole process will culminate in a controlled splashdown in the South Pacific Ocean.
According to Sarah Walker, SpaceX’s director of Dragon mission management, the DV can power up to six times more propellant than previous Dragons did and generate and store three to four times more power. It ensures the ability of the DV to operate with the ISS for 18 months before complex deorbit maneuvers are performed.
Meanwhile, Astroscale has landed the final funding needed to execute a demonstration mission in 2026 for the removal of a defunct OneWeb satellite from low Earth orbit. The Japanese-based firm secured about $15 million from the UK Space Agency and the European Space Agency to fund the latter stages of the ELSA-M mission. This phase covers the assembly, integration, and testing of the ELSA-M flight model equipped with a capture mechanism designed for OneWeb satellites.
According to Astroscale UK Managing Director Nick Shave, ELSA-M will attempt to deorbit a non-operational OneWeb satellite. It will burn up in Earth’s atmosphere itself five years after the end of the mission. It could capture spacecraft weighing up to 800 kilograms, and each ELSA-M servicer can capture multiple satellites in a single mission.
Another mission in development at Astroscale is the ADRAS-J, a mission to survey a Japanese upper stage left in LEO after it malfunctioned there. Meanwhile, the UK Space Agency has been deliberating on whether to select Astroscale or its Swiss competitor ClearSpace for a 2026 mission to remove two defunct satellites.
Coordinating with SpaceX is very important with NASA and its international partners—the European, Canadian, Japanese, and Russian space agencies—planning for a controlled deorbit of the ISS. Similarly, Astroscale reflects the leadership in satellite cleanup that will broaden activity in space-debris removal as a prerequisite for continued sustainability in LEO operations.