The Downfall Of The International Space Station…

Описание: On June 5, 2026, five astronauts on the International Space Station put on their spacesuits, took shelter in their docked spacecraft, and prepared to evacuate. The alarm was lifted within hours. But for several tense moments, the world was reminded of something it had been quietly trying to forget.

The most ambitious human structure ever placed in orbit - the largest international engineering project in history - is slowly falling apart.

The ISS is now twenty-seven years old. Its original design life was fifteen. Since 2019, a slow leak in the Russian Zvezda module has been worsening year over year. Its solar arrays have lost capacity. Russian engineers identified fine cracks in its structural hull as far back as 2021. And in 2022, NASA officially announced what most insiders had long known - the International Space Station will be deliberately deorbited in 2030, steered into the South Pacific Ocean over a spacecraft graveyard called Point Nemo.

NASA has already paid SpaceX $843 million to build the vehicle that will do it.

In this episode of Orbitus, we walk through how the ISS got this old, what is actually breaking, the deorbit plan that few people outside aerospace circles know about, and the four-way race to replace it - Axiom Space, Vast, Starlab, Orbital Reef, and the only crewed space station that does not need to wait. China's Tiangong.

This is the story of the slow death of humanity's longest continuously inhabited outpost in space - and what comes after.

🌌 Sources & further reading
NASA - ISS Transition Plan and 2030 deorbit announcement
NASA Office of Inspector General reports on the ISS Zvezda module air leak
NASA - $843M SpaceX contract for the United States Deorbit Vehicle (USDV)
SpacePolicyOnline and EarthSky - June 2026 shelter-in-place reporting
Axiom Space, Vast Space, Voyager Space (Starlab), and Blue Origin/Sierra Space (Orbital Reef) - commercial station program documentation
China National Space Administration (CNSA) - Tiangong space station mission archive
U.S. Wolf Amendment (2011) - historical legislative context for U.S./China space cooperation
All footage and imagery credited to NASA / Roscosmos / ESA / SpaceX / CNSA / commercial station partners where applicable. Public domain and CC-licensed visuals used under official media guidelines.

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