Is the ISS coming down? Yes, on purpose, after it retires in 2030

Yes. NASA and its partners plan to keep the International Space Station flying through 2030 and then bring it down on purpose, steering it into an empty stretch of the South Pacific with a US Deorbit Vehicle built by SpaceX. By then its oldest modules will be past the life they were designed for, and NASA would rather rent space on commercial stations than keep running this one.

If the plan holds, you have about four years to see it with your own eyes, and on the right evenings or mornings that's easy. The station is also the only fast-moving thing in the sky my Mac app draws, so I have a selfish interest in when it goes.

Is the space station still in use?

Yes, and it's busy. Someone has lived aboard every day since 2 November 2000. NASA's update of 13 October 2026 counts seven people up there for Expedition 75 (three from Roscosmos, three from NASA and one from the Canadian Space Agency) and a new Dragon cargo ship on its way to them.

Orbit itself started with me wondering what view the people up there must have (the long version).

When is the ISS coming down, and what's the retirement date?

NASA's line, from the day it picked SpaceX to build the deorbit vehicle, is that the station comes down "after the end of its operational life in 2030". The US, Japan, Canada and ESA's participating countries have committed to running it that long. Russia had committed to at least 2028, and on 14 July 2026 the head of Roscosmos, Dmitry Bakanov, said the agencies had agreed to extend joint operations through 2030, TASS reported.

Date	What
26 Jun 2024	NASA picks SpaceX to build the US Deorbit Vehicle
1 Aug 2028	The delivery date NASA's 2023 request for the vehicle asked for
1 May 2029	The latest delivery that request allowed
30 Sep 2030	The earliest end of operations Congress allows
Jan 2031	The deorbit NASA's 2022 transition report assumed for its budget
After operations end	The final re-entry burn; NASA's 2024 documents give no date

That January 2031 is where the "coming down in 2031" headlines come from. NASA's 2022 transition report budgeted for a deorbit then. Its newer deorbit white paper of June 2024, where most of the numbers in this post come from, gives an order of events instead of a date: drag lowers the station, the last crew comes home, and then operators "command a large re-entry burn". The two delivery dates are from a NASA procurement sheet.

All of this could still slide. If no commercial station is ready by 2030, the white paper says extending the ISS "is a possibility", and the deorbit vehicle can wait on the ground. The US Government Accountability Office wrote in June 2026 that NASA has to judge in 2027 whether one will be ready in time.

Why is the space station being decommissioned?

The frame is getting old, and NASA would rather be a customer than a landlord.

The first pieces, Zarya and Unity, went up in 1998. The modules and truss were designed for 30 years in orbit, and by 2030 those first two will have done 32. The station goes round Earth 16 times a day, in and out of Earth's shadow, and that heating and cooling, plus the shove of every docking and undocking, is what wears the structure. Solar arrays, radios, life support and science kit can be swapped in orbit. The crewed modules and the truss "cannot be repaired or replaced practically".

To be fair to the old thing, NASA's own analyses "show ample margin to fly through at least 2030", and the forces on it have been lower than first forecast.

NASA's transition plan says its goal is "to be one of many customers" on commercially owned stations. Nobody wants the old one, either. When NASA asked US industry, it got "no feasible proposals" to use the hardware after the station's life, because of its age, its complexity and the way ownership is split between companies and countries.

Why can't the ISS just stay up there?

The station flies about 420 kilometres (260 miles) up and weighs about 420 tonnes, and even there the thin air drags it down. Without a push it would fall in roughly one to two years, so visiting ships nudge it up from time to time. On 27 August 2026 a Cygnus XL cargo ship fired its thrusters for 20 minutes and 43 seconds and raised the station's lowest point by about 4 kilometres (that one mainly lined the station up for a Russian cargo launch).

My first question would have been why nobody pushes it much higher and keeps it. NASA looked at that, and at every other way out, and turned each one down. Even a slow electric tug to a 1,000-year orbit only hands the problem to whoever is around in the year 3000.

Option	The problem
Boost it to about 800 km	Crew and cargo ships are built for about 415 km, the climb needs tankers that don't exist, and a hole-punching debris hit would come every 4 years or so instead of every 51
Electric tug to a 1,000-year orbit	About 3 years of constant thrust and 15,000 kg of propellant, through radiation belts it wasn't built for, and it still falls one day, uncontrolled
Break it up in orbit	About 220 million pieces of debris over 1 mm, against about 100 million up there now
Take it apart and bring it home	Building it took 27 shuttle flights plus partner missions, 13 years and 161 spacewalks, and NASA says no spacecraft today could carry modules home the way the shuttle did
Let it fall on its own	Very large pieces scattered over a wide area, somewhere under its path

How will the ISS be deorbited, and where will it land?

US rules say a spacecraft coming back must keep the chance of hurting anyone on the ground no higher than 1 in 10,000. The ISS is so big that an uncontrolled fall would scatter very large pieces over a wide area, so it needs a controlled re-entry, and Russia's Progress cargo ships don't have enough push to do that on their own.

That's the job of the US Deorbit Vehicle. SpaceX's contract is worth up to $843 million, and the vehicle is a Dragon with an upgraded trunk, the section behind the capsule. NASA will own and fly it, and said in 2024 that it would buy the launch separately. At the end it breaks up along with the station.

First, drag is left to pull the station down as far as is safe, so the final burn has less work to do. Once all the crew are home, operators line up its path over the ground and fire one large burn. The aim is to keep the falling debris in a strip no more than about 6,000 km long, in an uninhabited part of the South Pacific. The 2022 transition report places it around Point Nemo, the spot in the ocean farthest from land, so there's no beach nearby to watch from. What survives sinks, and toxic liquids are expected to burn up on the way down.

Mir went the same way on a smaller scale. Russia's station came down over the Pacific in a controlled deorbit on 23 March 2001 after 15 years up, its debris falling east of New Zealand.

What will replace the ISS?

Several private stations, with NASA as a paying customer. On 9 October 2026 NASA released its final request for proposals for commercial space stations. Proposals are due on 8 December, and contracts are expected in spring 2027. The GAO counts six US companies working with NASA and sees "several risks that could lead to a gap in human presence" in low Earth orbit.

The four names you'll see most, as last reported:

Station	Who is building it	Status as reported	Source
Axiom Station	Axiom Space	First module to launch no earlier than 2028 and dock at the ISS; a second about a year later, for a four-person station before the ISS shuts down	Payload, 13 Feb 2026
Haven-1	Vast	In integration; Vast says it will be ready to launch in the first quarter of 2027, on a Falcon 9	Vast, 20 Jan 2026
Starlab	Starlab Space, with Voyager, Airbus, Mitsubishi and others	Finished its commercial critical design review and moved into fabrication; no launch year given	Starlab, 23 Feb 2026
Orbital Reef	Blue Origin	Passed a human-in-the-loop test milestone with life-size mock-ups; no launch date published	NASA, 16 Apr 2025

Sources: Payload on Axiom, Vast, Starlab and NASA on Orbital Reef. As of 20 October 2026 none of them is in orbit, and the earliest launch any of them names is Haven-1's, early in 2027.

Closer to home for me, India plans its own five-module Bharatiya Antariksh Station, and the Cabinet has approved the first module, BAS-01, for launch by 2028, says the Department of Space.

How to see the ISS before it comes down

You don't need a telescope. Visible passes happen only in the hour or two after sunset or before sunrise, when you're in the dark and the station is still in sunlight (why it only shows up at dawn and dusk). How to know if you saw the ISS covers what it looks like, and there's a separate guide to seeing it from India.

Passes come in runs of a few days, and my own city gets none this week: Orbit's ISS tile for Bengaluru says "No pass", with "in the next four days" under it. Sydney does better:

Day	Rises	Highest	Brightness (Heavens-Above)
Monday 26 October	8:21 PM, southwest	29°	Magnitude −2.5
Wednesday 28 October	8:23 PM, southwest	81°, nearly overhead	Magnitude −3.8

Heavens-Above agrees on both peak heights, and either pass outshines every star. Orbit times a pass from horizon to horizon (11 minutes on Monday), but you only see the sunlit part: on Monday the station slides into Earth's shadow at about 8:27 PM, 22° up in the east-southeast, so you'd get about four minutes of it more than 10° up. Orbit's desktop fades it out at the shadow too. I computed these with Orbit's engine on 20 October 2026; the times shift as the orbit data is updated, so check on the day.

⊕ Inspect the image

A closer look

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A close-up of a dark blue night sky with faint constellation lines and scattered small stars. In the middle, a white point with a short cyan trail running off to its right. A bright star at the top left is labelled Achernar.

Keeping track of those runs is one of the jobs I built Orbit for Mac to do. Click the Moon in the menu bar and its card shows the time of the next visible pass over a little arc as high as it climbs, with a gold button that plays it across your desktop in twelve seconds. During the real pass, the station crosses the sky on your desktop as a white point with a cyan trail.

Switch on ISS Passes and a silent "ISS rises in 5 minutes" arrives before every visible pass. (Orbit plans those while its sky is showing, so a Mac stuck behind a full-screen app for days runs out of them.) It's $6.99 once on the Mac App Store, no subscription, for macOS 15 or later on Apple silicon and Intel. The Mac page has screenshots, and ISS pass alerts on a Mac walks through the setup.

If you'd rather have it on your phone, Orbit on Android is free on Google Play and alerts you 12 minutes before a visible pass.