ISS will crash to Earth in fiery blaze leaving China to rule space alone by 2031

The International Space Station will crash to earth in a fiery inferno by the year 2031, leaving the Chinese to rule space alone.

The official line is that the craft will be 'deorbited,' but that means that it will fall to Earth and make its way to the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. An additional headache for NASA is that this means the sole space station orbiting Earth will be China’s Tiangong outpost.

And since NASA is restricted from working with China or visiting the station under US law, that means the country's space operation would be way out by itself.

READ MORE: First Brit could walk on surface of the Moon as early as 2025 in historic event

NASA’s goal is for commercial space stations to overlap with the end of the ISS, with first launches to begin “around 2029,” Camille Alleyne, deputy manager for NASA’s commercial space station program at the Johnson Space Center in Texas, said.

The organisation has already thrown money behind commercial ventures. In December 2021, NASA funded three US companies a total of $415 million (£331 million) to look into developing space stations.

“We need to still be in low Earth orbit,” says Alleyne. Missions to the Moon could be separated by years, but having a space station gives a “continuous presence” in space, she added.

Supercluster reported that aging hardware on the ISS informed part of the decision to retire the legendary ISS. It's hoped that the private ventures will replace much of the work the ISS leaves behind.

“We do a lot of science in microgravity that you cannot do here on Earth,” says Frank de Winne, head of ESA's European Astronaut Centre in Germany.

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He added: “We are in discussion with NASA and with the other ISS partners about how we’ll conduct science on commercial space stations."

It comes as Michelle Donelan, Secretary of State for Science in the UK said Brits could be aboard the Artemis III mission, the first American crewed lunar landing since Apollo 17 in December 1972.

She was visiting NASA HQ in Florida, USA, earlier this week when she grilled them on the possibility of a Brit on the moon.

Donelan told the Telegraph after her visit: "I asked NASA, in relation to the Artemis programme, what was the feasibility around the Artemis 3 mission, and they said it was incredibly possible."

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