The station is larger than a football field, weighs almost 450 tons, and will eventually fall to Earth.
The American Aeronautics and Space Administration NASA plans to spend about $1 billion on the correct destruction of the International Space Station. This was reported by Scientific American.
In the coming months, NASA will evaluate commercial proposals for vehicles capable of “decommissioning” the ISS. The destruction of the ISS is scheduled for the beginning of the next decade, but is already “a sensitive issue for aerospace engineering and international diplomacy.”
The ISS is located in low Earth orbit, in the rarefied upper layers of the Earth's atmosphere. Without regular accelerations, a spacecraft in low Earth orbit loses speed and altitude, eventually sinking low enough to break apart and burn up as it plunges into the atmosphere. Currently, the ISS's altitude is mainly provided by Russian Progress cargo ships. The truck docked to the ISS fires its engines from time to time to adjust its orbital altitude.
Theoretically, NASA could raise the ISS to a sufficient altitude so that it completely leaves the Earth's atmosphere. However, this would be too expensive, and there would still be a danger of the formation of huge amounts of debris that could damage the satellites. There are two options left – controlled or uncontrolled deorbit. The latter option is very dangerous due to the size of the station.
NASA says the safest way to bring the ISS back to Earth is to “dump” it into the sparsely populated South Pacific to reduce the likelihood of causing harm.