SpaceX's deorbit vehicle for the space station, from the 2024 award to a planned 2029 launch

On June 26, 2024, NASA announced from its headquarters in Washington that it had selected SpaceX to develop and deliver the U.S. Deorbit Vehicle, the spacecraft that is to steer the International Space Station into a controlled re-entry after the end of its operational life in 2030. The single-award contract had a total potential value of $843 million, and the launch was left for a separate purchase. SpaceX builds the vehicle, but NASA takes ownership after development and operates it, and the vehicle is expected to break up along with the station.

Two years on, the project is in development. NASA's budget request for fiscal 2027, posted in April 2026, says its cost and schedule baselines were approved in February 2026 and plans a launch in July 2029.

Why NASA chose a controlled re-entry

The station flies at about 415 kilometers (257 miles) and has a mass of more than 430,000 kilograms (945,000 pounds), according to NASA's transition questions and answers, last updated in July 2024. At that height the thin upper atmosphere still drags on it, and without reboosts it would fall back to Earth in roughly one to two years, depending on solar activity. Our explainer on orbital decay shows how that drag works.

NASA says the options it examined for retiring the station included taking it apart and returning it to Earth, boosting it to a higher orbit, letting it decay naturally and re-enter at random, and a controlled re-entry over a remote area of ocean. A boost would have needed far more propulsion. NASA put it at 120 to 140 meters per second of velocity change for an orbit lasting 100 years, and 760 meters per second for more than 10,000 years, against 57 meters per second for a controlled deorbit.

A random re-entry was ruled out by risk. US government standards limit the public risk from a re-entering spacecraft's debris to 1 in 10,000. The station is so large that an uncontrolled fall would scatter very large pieces over a wide footprint, NASA says, so it needs a controlled deorbit. NASA and its partners had studied using up to three of Roscosmos's Progress spacecraft for the job, but found that they would not provide enough margin to bring the risk down to the US standard.

What NASA asked for and bought

In September 2023, NASA asked US industry for proposals for a new spacecraft, or a modified existing one, focused on the final deorbit. It had to work on its first flight and carry enough redundancy and anomaly recovery to keep the critical deorbit burn going. In an update that December, NASA let bidders propose either a firm fixed price or a cost-plus-incentive-fee contract, and extended the deadline to February 12, 2024.

The contract NASA awarded to SpaceX in June 2024 is firm fixed price, according to the fiscal 2027 request. The vehicle is based on SpaceX's Cargo Dragon, with an enhanced trunk section to allow for more Draco thrusters. It will dock with the station, control its attitude, perform translational maneuvers and fire the final orbit-shaping and re-entry burns.

How the final descent is meant to work

NASA's plan combines natural orbital decay with a deliberate lowering of the station, likely using propulsion already there, and then a re-entry maneuver for final targeting. Once all crew members have returned to Earth, operators will line up the ground track over an uninhabited region of the ocean and command a large re-entry burn. Planning the re-entry allows a set date and time, a targeted location and a smaller debris footprint, NASA says.

Most of the station's hardware is expected to burn up or vaporize. Some denser or heat-resistant parts, such as truss sections, are expected to survive and splash down in the target area, where the debris would settle on the ocean floor. Based on the station's environmental impact statement, NASA expects no substantial long-term impacts.

Where the project stands

NASA's fiscal 2027 budget request lists the deorbit vehicle among its projects in development. It plans a critical design review in February 2027 and puts the vehicle's delivery readiness in October 2028. NASA will choose the rocket competitively through its Launch Services Program, and the launch cost sits inside the project's estimate, which also covers the spacecraft and the deorbit analysis, certification and vehicle configuration.

NASA's plans still end the station's life in 2030: the fiscal 2027 request plans its retirement that year and, in fiscal 2031, shifts about $1.0 billion within the budget to buying services from commercial space stations. When NASA announced the award in 2024, the partners' commitments differed: the United States, Japan, Canada and the European Space Agency's participating countries had committed to station operations through 2030, Russia to at least 2028. NASA said then that the safe deorbit is the responsibility of all five partner agencies.