What Should We Do About the International Space Station?

The International Space Station was never meant to last forever.

This was a distant concern in late 1998, when the United States, Canada, Russia, Japan, and European nations started launching hardware into space to assemble the largest human-made structure in orbit around Earth. But as the years went on—as the station’s operations expanded, as humans lived and ate and slept inside its cozy modules, as equipment broke and was repaired—some of the station’s stewards started to think more seriously about its future.

The question of how to wind down the ISS has come up regularly in the last decade. At each turn, the United States has its operating lifetime, to beyond 2016, then through 2020, and then to 2024. Many had suspected operations would eventually receive another extension, until 2028, while the station’s contractors said aging