After three decades circling Earth, in 2031 the International Space Station (ISS) will be handed its last rites. Some time in 2030, astronauts will depart the space station for the final time, and a docked SpaceX craft will provide a shunt of rocket thrust to move the ISS into a lower orbit.

As it hits the outer atmosphere, the station will begin to break up, before a final descent in which the ISS, which is approximately the size of a football field, will be ditched somewhere in the Pacific Ocean.

The death of the ISS will mark the close of a major chapter in human space exploration.

Until now, space stations have been the preserve of nation states, with only the ISS and China’s Tiangong in operation. The stations have required billions of dollars of investment and dozens of rocket launches.

But that could be about to change. Just as SpaceX has triggered a flood of funding into private rocket companies, private space stations have been […]