Dump it, smoke it, park it?

The Spacecraft Cemetery is the most remote place on Earth. Formally called the South Pacific Ocean Uninhabited Area and centered on a point known as Point Nemo – from the Latin for no one – it sits at more than 2,688 km from the nearest land. There is no coast in any direction. This is where spaceships go to die.

Over 250 spacecraft, including the Mir space station, have ended their journeys in this region.

Anyone who has worked in technology knows what technical debt feels like. You move fast, you make choices, you ship. The reckoning comes later – in the form of systems that are expensive to change, brittle under pressure, resistant to the future you now need to build. You defer the hard decisions. The interest compounds. Eventually the debt becomes the reason the whole system is difficult to change.

Innovation debt works the same way. The codebase in this case being a space station. And the ocean is the write-off.

In 2030 or 2031, humanity’s most expensive and ambitious collaborative engineering project in low-Earth orbit yet, the International Space Station, was supposed to join them. A $150 billion structure. Thirteen years to build. Fifteen nations. And no plan, from the beginning, for what happened at the end.

That is not an oversight. That is innovation debt – and this is what it looks like when the bill arrives.

A last-minute rethink

ISS operations end in 2030, and until February this year, it was destined to find its eternal resting place at Point Nemo. Then, in February 2026, the US House of Representatives’ Science, Space and Technology Committee unanimously passed an amendment requiring NASA to formally reconsider that plan – asking whether the ISS could instead be stored in a higher, stable orbit once it reaches the end of its useful life.

The optics of sustainability you think; but no. The real drivers were a $150 billion sunk cost, commercial anxiety about having no replacement station ready before 2030, and geopolitical alarm about China’s expanding presence in low-Earth orbit. As one congressman put it, the concern was about protecting taxpayer investment – not the Pacific Ocean.

It is, in other words, the logic of keeping the old diesel. Not because you believe in it. Because the electric one isn't ready, the budget is tight, and you still need to say you have a car.

The environmental case, meanwhile, is real but legally toothless. The ISS weighs roughly 420 tonnes. When it re-enters, a significant portion will survive as debris on the ocean floor, along with potential leaks of toxic propellants. Ocean scientists have compared NASA’s plan to discarding single-use plastics in the ocean – the act of rendering pollution out of sight and out of mind. But there is no specific legally binding obligation under space law to conduct an environmental impact assessment before dropping a space station into international waters. There is no law. There is no precedent. There is just a very remote stretch of Pacific and a tradition of using it as a dump.

Parking the station higher isn’t the answer either. NASA’s own analysis shows that raising the orbit dramatically increases the probability of collision with other satellites – from an estimated 51 years between impacts at its current altitude to less than four years at a higher one. More debris risk, no crew to manage it, no plan for what happens next. It just defers the problem. It refinances the debt without paying it down.

No decision has been made. But whether it sinks or parks, the question remains the same: how did we get here?

The pattern no one named

The ISS is not a failure. It is a masterpiece of engineering, political cooperation, and human endurance. Sixteen nations built it. Humans have lived continuously aboard it for over 24 years. It has produced extraordinary science.

But it was designed entirely inside a linear innovation logic. Forward-only design, in which the next mission is always ahead, and end-of-life is someone else’s problem, in someone else’s budget cycle, in someone else’s decade. 

• No one in 1984, when Reagan announced the project, was asked to design for decommissioning. 

• No one building the first module in 1998 was responsible for what happens in 2031.

• Every decision that did not ask “what happens at the end?” was a withdrawal on a credit line nobody consciously opened. 

This is not unique to space. It is a recurring structural pattern in how technological sectors mature.

Extraction

The early phase of any major technological endeavour is extractive by nature. Urgency dominates. Resources appear abundant. The goal is to achieve the thing, not to account for its full lifecycle. Fossil fuels, aviation, plastics, the internet – all began in this mode. The ISS was no different. The space race was a geopolitical sprint. Sustainability was not a design constraint; it was not even a question. Innovation debt accrues fastest here, when no one is counting.

Optimisation

The middle phase arrives when margins tighten or resources grow scarce. Efficiency logic kicks in. Reuse becomes attractive not because of values but because of economics. NASA began extending ISS operations well beyond its original end date. SpaceX replaced the Space Shuttle for supply missions at a fraction of the cost. The station was optimised and prolonged. Some of the debt is serviced – but the principal remains.

Stewardship/End of life

And then comes the late phase – the crisis phase – where regenerative thinking finally appears. Not because it was planned for, but because the consequences of not planning for it have become undeniable. Congress debates what to do with the wreckage. Ocean scientists raise alarms. Environmental lawyers note the absence of law. A $843 million deorbit contract is signed with SpaceX. Wisdom arrives, but the design is already locked in. The damage – or in this case, the dump – is already decided. This is what paying off innovation debt looks like: expensive, disruptive, and too late to change the outcome that mattered.

In Swedish there is a word for this: efterklok. Wise after the event. The ISS is efterklok at civilisational scale.

What is striking is not that this happened once. It is that it happens every time – and that we have the data to see it coming. We can model material flows. We can simulate end-of-life scenarios. We can run lifecycle assessments at the planning stage. The tools for anticipatory design exist. We simply do not build them into the innovation process at the moment they would actually matter.

Maturity models in organisational theory do name a regenerative stage – it sits at the top of the ladder, representing the highest level of systemic integration. But the models stop at the organisational level. No framework maps this arc across entire technological sectors over their full lifespan: that extractive logic is structurally first, efficiency logic structurally second, and regenerative thinking structurally last – arriving, almost always, after the design decisions that would have mattered are irreversible. 

What circular foresight would have asked

Anticipatory design does not require a crystal ball. It requires a different set of questions asked earlier. What is this made of, and where does it go? Who inherits the consequences? What happens when this is finished? These are not philosophical questions. They should be integrated with R&D and quality assurance. 

Had circular foresight been applied to the ISS at the planning stage – in the 1980s, when the political will and budget existed – the station might have been designed with modular components built for eventual retrieval or reuse. The aluminium, titanium, and steel that will now either burn in re-entry or corrode on the ocean floor have enormous value in orbit, precisely because launching mass is the most expensive thing humans do. At current SpaceX pricing, 420 tonnes of raw orbital mass represents enormous latent value – value that forward-only design made inaccessible.

A regeneratively designed ISS might also have considered what it could become, not just what it could do. Some of the structures that survive atmospheric re-entry could, in principle, be guided not to the deepest and most remote part of the Pacific but to shallower coastal zones where – properly stripped of toxic materials and intentionally designed for the purpose – they could function as artificial reef infrastructure. This is not as speculative as it sounds. Decommissioned ships, oil platforms, and military vehicles are routinely sunk to create marine habitat under the US Rigs-to-Reefs programme and equivalent schemes globally. Within weeks of placement, algae colonise the surfaces. Within months, fish and invertebrates arrive. Within a year or two, the reef is ecologically functional. The ISS is, among other things, a very large metal structure with a great deal of surface complexity – exactly what artificial reefs require. What is the difference between an oil platform becoming a reef and a space station becoming one? Primarily: intent. And the moment in the design process when that intent could have been formed.

The law that arrived too late

In January 2026, the BBNJ Agreement – the UN’s High Seas Treaty – entered into force. After nearly two decades of negotiations and 60 state ratifications, it became the first legally binding international framework for the conservation of marine biodiversity in areas beyond national jurisdiction. For the first time, states are required to cooperate on environmental impact assessments for activities in international waters.

The ISS deorbit is scheduled for 2030 or 2031. The treaty is now law. Whether the deorbit constitutes an ‘activity’ requiring assessment under the BBNJ framework is, at the time of writing, legally unresolved. But the friction is there. And friction, in this case, is the point.

It is possible that the High Seas Treaty will force a more serious reckoning with what it means to drop a 420-tonne structure into international waters without an environmental plan. It is equally possible that it will not – that the geopolitical complexity of a 16-nation programme will produce the same answer it usually does, which is the path of least administrative resistance. Point Nemo remains the most convenient solution to a problem that was never designed out.

A hypothetical fourth phase

So when building the ISS replacement – how do we make it not just decommissioned responsibly, but transformed into something generative?

Companies like Astroscale and Starfish Space are developing in-orbit servicing capabilities: refuelling, life extension, debris removal. Starfish Space was awarded the first-ever commercial end-of-life satellite disposal contract in January 2026. The technology for robotic disassembly in orbit does not yet exist at the scale the ISS would require, but the trajectory is clear. D-Orbit’s CEO has spoken publicly about the possibility of orbital recycling stations that could capture defunct satellites and process them as raw materials for future structures. The ISS arrived a decade or two too early for that future. But its ending could fund it – if anyone chose to frame the decommissioning as a design challenge rather than a disposal problem.

The fourth phase of an innovation lifecycle would look like this: the end of one generation of technology becomes the feedstock for the next. Not burned, not sunk, not parked in a higher orbit where it becomes someone else’s debris problem – but deliberately, intentionally closed into the loop of what comes after. Innovation debt not written off, but converted into equity for the next cycle. 

We do not have the infrastructure for that yet. But we are building it. The question is whether the institutional will to use it will arrive before the next generation of orbital infrastructure inherits the same design logic as the last.

The question that needs to be asked first

The ISS will be deorbited, or parked, or something else entirely – the debate continues. What it will not be is redesigned. But it might offer training ground for regenerative space design. 

But the next station is already being planned. Axiom Space is building commercial modules. Starlab is in development. The logic that governs their design – whether it is linear innovation logic or something more complete – is being set right now, in engineering meetings and budget conversations and political agreements, by people who may or may not be asking what happens in 2055 when those structures reach the end of their useful lives.

Anticipatory design and circular foresight are not utopian concepts. They are a set of questions: What is this made of? Where does it go? Who inherits the consequences? What does it become when it is done? These questions cost nothing to ask at the beginning. They cost enormously to answer at the end. That is the nature of debt.

The Spacecraft Cemetery is filling up. We keep sending things there that we designed without asking where they would go. At some point, that stops being an oversight and starts being a choice. And a choice, unlike a debt, cannot be refinanced.

illuminem Voices is a democratic space presenting the thoughts of leading Sustainability & Energy writers, their opinions do not necessarily represent those of illuminem.