THE 21st CENTURY ISN’T WORKING OUT AS I HAD HOPED: Musk Tapped to Deorbit ISS.

While it seems hard to believe, the International Space Station (ISS) was put into orbit more than 25 years ago…There is no question that something will need to be done with the ISS when its mission is over. Once the fuel for its thrusters runs out, its orbit will slowly begin to decay and at some point, it will reenter the atmosphere and come down. The ISS weighs 462 tons. It is too massive to fully burn up upon reentry, so at least some of it will reach the surface as a massive fireball traveling at supersonic speed. If it were to strike land in a populated area it could be catastrophic.

Under the current plan, that’s where Elon Musk comes in. SpaceX will need to design, construct, and launch a new type of spacecraft that will dock with the ISS and guide it back into the atmosphere in a controlled fashion. Even that approach isn’t entirely without risk, of course. You don’t have to be off by much to wind up with the space station crashing down into a shipping lane. Even if everything goes flawlessly, we’re still going to wind up with yet another massive hunk of junk littering the ocean floor and we’ll pay more than $800 million for the privilege of doing so.

And unlike Skylab’s descent in July of 1979, we probably won’t even get any decent novelty songs out of the crash: