This is Point Nemo, the most remote place on Earth, the furthest you can get from any landmass. It’s here that in 2030, a rendevous has been set with one of humanity’s greatest feats of engineering. For over a quarter of a century, the International Space Station has served as our outpost in the cosmos.
A symbol of human ingenuity and unprecedented international cooperation. With a construction cost of more than 160 billion US, it’s the most expensive thing ever built and easily one of the most complex. When I think about the International Space Station, the the word masterpiece just comes to mind. It is a work of art, just like technical and engineering skill that I don’t I don’t know that we’ve brought it together that way in any other place.
No structure on Earth has to cope with temperature swings of 270° C, nor with being pieced together at 22 times the speed of sound. And yet in just 5 years time, the final remains of this extraordinary achievement are going to be driven into the ocean as part of the most challenging demolition project ever [Music] attempted.
But why does this extraordinary achievement have to meet its end? And could we not find a way to save it as a testament to human endeavor? Well, to understand that, we’re first going to have to discover how it was built and what that means for our future in space. The year is 2030 and a specially built SpaceX Dragon is about to set off on its journey to the International Space Station.
The Dragon first entered service in 2012, fing cargo to the station with a newer version coming along 9 years later to carry the crew. The variant, however, has been specially developed to serve a very particular function. It’s equipped with 46 Draco thrusters, small rocket engines capable of generating over 40 kilos of force. A normal Dragon has only 16.
Its trunk is twice as long as a typical craft, allowing it to carry six times the amount of fuel. That’s going to allow it to generate up to four times the usual power of a dragon, which is perfect to help it complete its mission of putting an end to one of humanity’s greatest achievements.
Someone who knows just how incredible the ISS is is Nicole Sto. She served on it twice. Once in 2009 and again in 2011. I think if you look at pictures now of it, you know, that are taken from another spacecraft of it orbiting Earth, it looks like a work of art. You know, chunks of metal, you know, or modules that would fit inside of a space shuttle payload bay and be able to send those up separately to space and then hook them together and use robotic arms and spacew walking astronauts to bolt it all together and hook it together and have it work.
Once it’s there, the ISS is not the first or the last space station to take up orbit around the Earth, but none of the others have come close to matching the size or scale of its ambition. The journey began back in 1971 with the launch of Salot 1 by the Soviet Union, the first ever space station. It was a groundbreaking but short-lived achievement lasting just 175 days.
The first crude attempt to board it failed. And while a second attempt succeeded, tragedy struck on their return when the Soyers 11 capsule depressurized while preparing for re-entry, killing all three cosmonauts. In the wake of this, Salute 1 was terminated and it was allowed to burn up in the Earth’s atmosphere less than 5 months after its launch.
But despite the rocky start, NASA and the Soviet space program continued to develop crude outposts in space. Over the next 16 years, eight different space stations were launched with the US premiering Skylab, its first attempt back in 1973. With each new station, the ambition of what could be achieved slowly grew.
These space stations became larger and remained in service for longer periods. The biggest breakthrough came with the USSR’s MI space station which launched in 1986. Where previous stations were composed of a single monolithic unit, MIR was the first truly modular station being slowly built in stages over the course of 10 years. The US wasn’t far behind.
In the 1980s, it began developing its own modular station called Freedom. But while this new generation of space stations promised unprecedented technological advancements, they came at a crippling cost. The Freedom underwent intense scrutiny and the program suffered multiple budget cuts until it was abandoned altogether.
By 1993, as the Cold War ended and Russia’s ability to maintain mere weakened, the two nations decided to come together, not as rivals, but as colleagues. And so the ISS was born. Soon after other space agencies recognized the significance of this collaboration and joined the program. The European Space Agency, Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency, and Canadian Space Agency all signed up, bringing their technological expertise and resources to the project, transforming the ISS into a truly international endeavor and creating an unprecedented shared commitment to space
exploratio
n and scientific advancement. It’s the result of that collaboration that we see today. A sprawling structure consisting of 43 interconnected modules and elements covering an area larger than a football field. It’s a global effort and a contrast to modern space exploration which is increasingly fueled by private companies held by the billionaire class.
From Elon Musk’s SpaceX to Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin. But billionaires like Bezos aren’t just investing in space. He’s also spent tens of millions on another exclusive investment, fine arts, where he’s reportedly become a top 200 collector. And Bezos isn’t alone. A 2023 study by Deote estimated the overall art and collectibles wealth to be at nearly $2.
2 trillion while projecting it could hit nearly $2.9 trillion next year, leaving room for potential upside. It’s no wonder that today’s video sponsor, Masterworks’ art investing platform, has already had over a billion dollars of invested capital from 65,000 plus active investors with previous art offerings featuring legends like Picasso, Bascar, and Banksy.
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Now, let’s get back to the space station. Everything started in 1998 when this, the Russian Zarya or Sunrise module entered orbit. Construction of the ZA began in 1994 at the Kurinichev State Research and Production Space Center in Moscow. It was manufactured from rolled aluminium with steel providing strength in essential areas like as with the docking mechanism.
Thermal insulation was provided by a ceramic blanket and crucially kevlar provided the module’s armor. More on that later. For power, it was fitted with two solar arrays which charged six nickel cadium batteries capable of providing 3 kW of power. Now, to put that into context, that’s about the same amount of power as your domestic oven currently runs off.
In other words, the amount of power that you now use to cook a pizza was used to operate the fledgling ISS. If you take a closer look at Zarya, you’ll notice something that we see on all habitable ISS modules, and that’s the cylindrical shape. Now, that’s partly to make it easier to fit into the cargo bay of space shuttles, which fied most of the components up into space.
But there’s actually another much more crucial reason. Now, just quickly, this, as I’m sure you know, is a can of fizzy drink. It’s Coca-Cola in this case. We’re not sponsored by Coca-Cola yet. Other fizzy drinks are available. This is just what they had in my local shop. Anyway, the reason I’m showing you this is because the design of the aluminium can is just about the greatest design in the history of industrial design.
And there’s a few reasons for that. First of all, it’s very efficient. Because it’s a cylinder, it uses the least amount of material to enclose a space as compared to other shapes like cubes or rectangular prisms. That also means it’s very light. Secondly, the atmospheric pressure in there is about twice of what it is out here.
Although it could go up to six times that, and it’s all thanks to that round shape. It makes sure that internal pressure is evenly distributed. There are no weak spots, and the can ends up incredibly strong. Now, believe it or not, the modules on the ISS are actually incredibly similar to this can. They need to be lightweight so they can be launched into space, but also because of the pressure differences up there, strong enough to withstand the forces acting on them.
Booster ignition and liftoff of the space shuttle Endeavor with the first American. A month after ZA came the first US capsule, Unity, which provided the first living and working space and created a bridge between the Russian and US halves of the ISS. But it was here that two construction methods kind of clashed for the first time because both the US and Russia had each developed their own mutually incompatible docking systems.
The US capsules use the common birthing mechanism or CBM. That system relies on two interlocking rings, one passive and one active. During docking, the passive ring is inserted into the active site where a series of latches engage to create an initial soft capture. Once aligned, 16 motorized bolts secure the connection, forming a rigid and airtight seal.
Meanwhile, Russia had developed its own docking technology known as the androgynous peripheral attach system or APAS. Unlike the CBM, APAS uses two identical symmetrical docking rings equipped with a capture mechanism in sight. That design allows either end to act as the active or passive side, making it more versatile in automated docking scenarios.
To overcome these different mechanisms, a special unit known as a pressurized mating adapter or PMA was developed. This unit serves as an interface, creating a pressurized tunnel between Russian and US modules. The first PMA was installed between Z and Unity, the initial Russian and American segments of the ISS. In total, three PMAs were added to the station to facilitate docking with both shuttlebased and Russian Sawyer spacecraft.
After Unity, the next major component added to the ISS was the Zvezda service module, which arrived on the 26th of July 2000. Zvezda was the first fully functional living space aboard the station. It provided life support systems, flight controls, and crew living quarters, making it the true backbone of the Russian segments. A crucial milestone was reached at the end of the year 2000 with the installation of the P6 truss, which housed the first major heat sink panels and large solar array wings.
These arrays significantly increased the station’s power generation abilities, meaning the ISS was now ready to sustain life on a permanent basis. Then on November 2nd, 2000, NASA astronaut Bill Shepard and Russian cosmonauts Yuri Gdzenko and Sergey Cricv arrived aboard the ISS, becoming its first full-time residence.
It’s a moment that marked the beginning of an unbroken line of human habitation in space, which continues to this day. Now, this is what the ISS looked like at this point, which is still some way off how it appears today. So, to understand how it all works, we’re going to skip forward a bit to 2011, which marked the end of the main period of construction.
But before we do that, I don’t know about you, but I’ve just got to know, what is it really like to live and work up there on the International Space Station? Life on board the the space station is, I mean, it’s extraordinary in so many ways. You’re in this place where your body behaves different. You’re actually getting to float and fly in three dimensions.
That doesn’t mean that there’s not a real significance or seriousness, I guess, to the work that we’re doing. As astronauts, we on a daily basis are doing some level of maintenance on the space station. you know, routine stuff that stuff that could be as as simple as like cleaning. You know, we we we have to do the housekeeping on board the space station or things like repairing the toilet or going outside and fixing a solar array or replacing batteries that had, you know, the end of their service life. And, you know, just the same as
what you would do on a building here on Earth. Those same kinds of things have to be considered on a space station. Okay. To begin with, this is the top and this is the front. As it flies over the Earth at 28,000 km an hour, it’s this part of the station that will first see the 16 sunrises that the ISS witnesses every day.
Like a ship, it has a port side over here and a very appropriately named starboard side over here. This is Unity, the bridge we saw earlier, also known by its operational name, node one. Coming off the side of Unity’s starboard side is Tranquility, a functional node that allows additional modules to be connected.
But Tranquility is also home to one of the most iconic features of the ISS, the Coppella. This module with its seven windows gives astronauts an incredible view of Earth and has been responsible for some of the most breathtaking images ever taken. Coming off the front of Unity is Destiny, the first dedicated laboratory on the ISS.
Beyond that is Harmony, another functional node designed to connect more modules. Attached to Harmony’s starboard side is the European Columbus lab. While on the port side, we have KBO, Japan’s own research module. At the very end of KBO is the exposed facility, which allows experiments to be conducted directly in the vacuum of space.
But all of that would just be a very expensive tin can if it wasn’t for one critical piece of apparatus, the integrated truss structure. This houses two critical utilities, the station’s power plant and radiators. To build it, nine truss segments were gradually installed on the ISS after being anchored to the roof of Destiny.
Over the course of 3 years, solar panels were added to both ends of the truss. Although it would continue to evolve over the next few years, by 2011, the ISS was complete and able to fully realize its mission to push the possibility of long-term space exploration and improve life here on Earth. 7 6 5 4 3 2 Back in 2030, SpaceX Dragon has begun its journey to the ISS on board a specially developed rocket.
On a typical mission, after launch, the Dragon begins a series of meticulously timed maneuvers. Around 158 seconds into the flight, the main engines of the Falcon rocket shut down. At this stage, it’s traveling at about 10 times the speed of sound. 80 km above the Earth. A few seconds later, the first and second stages separate, and the secondary engine begins a 7-minute burn, which brings the Falcon and Dragon to low Earth orbit.
As this happens, the Dragon’s nose cone gets discarded, revealing the birthing mechanism. 9 minutes and 37 seconds after launch, the second stage engines cut off and 35 seconds later, the Dragon detaches, having reached an orbit where it can begin the finetuning to align with the ISS, 420 km above the Earth’s surface. Now, to put that into context, if you were to fly from LA to Vegas, it would take you about an hour and a quarter.
The Dragon will have covered that distance in just over 10 minutes. But when the final Dragon takes this mission, it won’t have to climb anywhere near as high. Since 2026, the ISS has been allowed to slowly de-orbit and fall towards Earth, which gives us a clue as to why the ISS needs to be decommissioned in the first place.
Okay, so we need to talk about height because the altitude the ISS orbits the Earth at is very carefully calibrated. Obviously, it needs to be high enough to experience weightlessness and space-like conditions, which is why it orbits here in the upper reaches of the thermosphere. That’s high enough to conduct research in a microgravity environment. But there’s a catch.
There’s still enough atmosphere here to create some drag on the space station, which constantly pulls it very slowly back down to Earth. In other words, the ISS may be in orbit traveling very, very fast, 28,000 km an hour fast, but it’s not floating, it’s flying. Every few months, a rocket visits the ISS to reboost it, which is why its actual altitude varies between about 370 and 460 km depending on where it is in this cycle.
So, that’s one reason we need to figure out what to do with the ISS. If we just abandoned it, it would eventually fall to Earth and it could land anywhere. But at this point, you might be thinking to yourself, well, hang on a minute. Why don’t we just avoid that problem altogether by operating the space station at a much higher altitude? The thing is, if you do that, you run into a whole other world of problems.
The cost and technical complexity of sending crew and cargo missions would just be too great. But there’s another much more catastrophic reason why the ISS can’t fly that high. One that serves as a reminder of the truly brutal conditions this station exists in. Remember that Kevlar armor that wraps around the outer casing of the ISS modules? That’s to protect the structure from the constant bombardment of tiny meteorites and space junk.
The US Department of Defense tracks objects orbiting Earth. So when a large piece of debris, say around 10 cm, is heading towards the ISS, the station just fires its boosters and dodges out of the way. But there’s no way of avoiding smaller objects. And thanks to the thin atmosphere, these can travel up to 10 km a second, meaning even tiny collisions can have a catastrophic effect.
In 2016, the ESA released an image of a 7 mm wide crack in one of the windows of the Copula, which was thought to have been caused by a fleck of paint. Accidents like these are random. But there’s another factor which happens like clockwork that places immense strain on the structure of the ISS. To explain that, let’s look at one of the most impressive buildings down here on Earth.
Building the Burj Khalifa wasn’t a challenge just because of its incredible height. Engineers were pushed to find extreme solutions to everything from how to stop it sinking into the desert sand to how to prevent it being blown over by the winds. But there’s one other aspect of this huge building that just doesn’t get enough attention.
How it regulates its temperature in the blistering Dubai sun. The tower uses a huge range of techniques to reduce the amount of heat it absorbs. Every one of the building’s glass panels are coated with a special silver lining that reflects the sun. That prevents the building taking on too much heat and crucially helps it regulate the massive swings in temperatures it can experience between day and night and between summer and winter.
Now, that matters because it’s not just the people inside the Burj Khif that need to be protected, but the building itself. And that’s all due to something called thermal expansion. During construction, when the steelwork was still exposed, the Burj Khalifa was recorded as being 36 cm taller on the hottest afternoon of the year than it was on the coldest morning.
If left unchecked, that kind of thermal expansion and contraction leads to stress fatigue, which could undermine the integrity of the tower. The Burj Khalifa may be the tallest building in one of the hottest places on Earth, but its twice daily temperature swings between 10 and 15° C are nothing compared to what the ISS experiences.
The space station orbits the Earth 16 times a day, constantly flying through sunlight where temperatures soar to 120° before being plunged into minus 150° in the Earth’s shadow. The stress that places on the fabric of the ISS means that at some point a joint or weld will fail.
And on such a large and complex structure, it’s impossible to predict where. It’s a chilling reminder of just how precarious life on the ISS really is. It is a super hostile environment and it’s it’s as we say the deadly vacuum of space, right? But yeah, you hear it. You hear it, you smell it, you kind of feel it in ways that training doesn’t necessarily prepare you for on the ground.
And so those big thermal cycles, that 250° C shift that goes from sunlight to dark, um, you know, every 45 minutes as we go in and out of of the sunshine, you hear it. And it is kind of a creaky sound. It’s not big bangs or anything. It’s just kind of this, you know, what you would think of as like metal kind of creaking together or expanding and contracting.
Another reminder of the danger came in 2019 when a leak was discovered in the Zvezda module. It came from a microscopic crack here in the transfer tunnel leading to the aft docking port, also known as the PRK. At the time, Roscosmos, the Russian space agency that built Zvezda, determined the leak did not pose a threat.
But the rate at which air escaped the module increased and 5 years later in November 2024 the decision was taken to close the hatch leading to the PRK during standard operations. Today when the PRK needs to be accessed a hatch between the Russian and US halves of the ISS is closed to stop the entire space station depressurizing if the leak were to become catastrophic.
[Music] Once the Dragon has reached the ISS, it’ll dock. From there, the ISS will begin its final descent. But hang on a second. If the ISS can’t stay in orbit forever, that doesn’t mean we have to smash it into the Earth in a massive ball of fire, does it? Well, in 2022, NASA published a transition plan which outlined several options it considered for decommissioning the ISS.
It included an acknowledgement of the unique historical significance of the ISS and looked at a plan to disassemble the station in space and return it to Earth in pieces. But the report concluded that the task was just too complex. Besides needing a ton of planning, NASA figured it would take over 160 spacew walks, which is about the same number that have been performed at the ISS in its entire history so far.
[Music] 6. They’d also need a vehicle with a cargo bay big enough to keep the larger parts from burning up on re-entry. But after the space shuttle was put out of action in 2011, there just isn’t a vehicle capable of doing that. So instead of risking a controlled re-entry, why not just push the station off into space once and for all? Well, shoving it out of the Earth’s orbit completely and into deep space just isn’t feasible.
We don’t have the resources or the technology. But how about just pushing the space station up into that higher altitude we discussed earlier? It wouldn’t have made it possible to access when it was operational, but if it’s retired, it doesn’t matter, right? That was also looked at by NASA, but the plan run into countless problems, literally.
The ISS sits right at the bottom of what’s called low Earth orbit, which is basically anything below 2,000 km. It’s also the part of the atmosphere that has the highest concentration of space junk. Now, like we were talking about earlier, at the height the ISS flies at, most of that can either be avoided or is small enough for the station’s armor to withstand it on a day-to-day basis.
But as you go higher up into low Earth orbit, that changes dramatically. This chart shows a study which indicates the expected lifespan of the ISS at various altitudes before being disabled by a catastrophic collision. At its current height, it can likely survive more than 50 years. But that shrinks to just 3.8 years by the time it reaches 850 km.
In other words, if we just sent the ISS to a much higher orbit, it would get smashed to pieces and would cause a massive risk to future space travel and infrastructure. Again, there’s the problem of technology. The SpaceX Starship is currently the only rocket in development designed to deliver heavy cargo to the outer reaches of the Earth’s atmosphere.
But it’s just not designed to dock at the ISS. Even if it was possible, the immense power of its thrusters would likely cause the ISS to break apart as it began to move. So, if it can’t go up and it can’t stay where it is, it’s got to come down. The Dragon will connect to the ISS at around 280 km, the point of no return.
At some stage in 2030, the final crew will have visited and retrieved any essential equipment capable of being transported back. Once docked at the front of the ISS, the Dragon’s Draco thrusters are going to perform a series of burns, generating enough power to make sure the ISS re-enters the atmosphere at a high enough speed to ensure its destruction will be so total it poses no threat to life down here on Earth.
Shipping lanes and flight routes have been cleared along the path to avoid any collisions. and the South Pacific GIA, the strong series of currents that run through Point Nemo, will do its job of keeping marine life well clear. As the ISS passes below the 120 km mark, it begins to leave the thermosphere and the show begins. Traveling at 29,000 km an hour, the Earth’s rapidly thickening atmosphere starts to rip the space station apart.
The first things to go are the solar panels and radiators, and shortly after the modules. The friction of the atmosphere creates temperatures reaching 4,000° C, causing the scattered capsules to burst into flames. A spectacular fireball streaks 6,000 km across the skies as the biggest demolition job in history begins to melt the aluminium modules.
From that huge debris field, only a small few artifacts survive to splash down into Point Nemo. The International Space Station is the culmination of decades of relentless innovation, an achievement built by the hands of engineers and space agencies who constantly push the limits of what was possible. Each generation of the space station grew more ambitious and more complex until we arrived at the pinnacle with this extraordinary structure.
But when it all gets reduced down to just a few fragments of scorched metal, what are we going to look to next? NASA is currently backing the development of commercial space stations such as Star Lab and Axiom Station. These projects, along with several others in the works, promise to continue human space flight and research beyond the ISS era, but they’re all much smaller in scale and designed to operate as private enterprises rather than in the spirit of international cooperation and human endeavor.
Meanwhile, the largest space station current in operation after the ISS is China’s Tiang Gong, which began assembly in 2021. The age of a single massive international space facility may be over, but that’s proof of the incredible legacy of this [Music] building. The purpose of the ISS was to be our gateway to the stars, to help us conduct research that would help us go further and for longer than ever before.
But we shouldn’t forget that the ISS has always been as much about life down here as it is up there. The mission statement for the the tagline for the International Space Station is off the Earth for the Earth. Our job, yes, doing the science, using this place as a laboratory, exploration, all that kind of thing. But embedded in everything we’re doing, whether it’s how we built the space station and how we are providing ourselves with clean drinking water every day there or have access to clean air and an environment that allows us to survive and thrive in
that place. Everything we’re doing for that in one way or another is being brought back to Earth. Whether that’s going to a place that’s never had access to clean drinking water before and providing them with some version of the way we do that for ourselves in space. All of the science in one way or another is beneficial to life on Earth and some subset of it allows us to figure out how to explore further off the planet.
The ISS may one day be gone, but its legacy is woven into the fabric of our future. Both up in space and down here on Earth. It was never just a laboratory. It was proof of what humanity can achieve when we reach beyond our borders and beyond our limits. [Music] This video was sponsored by Masterworks. You can learn more about that at the link below.
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Now, if you excuse me, I’m going to go off and finally drink this can of Coke.
