The End of the ISS (and What Comes After)

The International Space Station—humanity's most ambitious construction project and longest-running orbital flatshare—is scheduled for retirement in 2030. 🎧 Love the show? Help us improve in 2 minutes: https://tally.so/r/nr1evM After twenty-five years of continuous occupation, 290 visitors from 26 countries, and over 4,000 experiments, the 420-ton station will make a controlled descent to Point Nemo, the spacecraft cemetery in the South Pacific. But what comes next? We explore the $843 million SpaceX deorbit contract, the aging infrastructure that's made retirement inevitable (including air leaks NASA classified as "highest risk" in 2024), and the race to build commercial replacements before the old station comes down. From Axiom's modules already docking with the ISS to Blue Origin's "business park in space," we examine whether the next era of low Earth orbit will be ready in time—and what's lost when international cooperation gives way to subscription-based access. AI Transparency: In a universe of AI-generated content, we believe in being transparent about what's human and what's not. Your time is valuable, and you deserve to know what you're experiencing. The narrator, David, is a professional voice actor who has digitized his voice through ElevenLabs' voice cloning technology and is fairly compensated for his vocal performance. Thumbnails are created with OpenArt AI, and music/sound effects come from Pixabay (which are generated by human artists). Everything else-the writing, jokes, research, sound editing, and interdimensional coffee consumption, is 100% human-made by a human. https://multiverseemployeehandbook.com