The Present Day and Planned Deorbit

After the end of the Space Shuttle, crew transport was provided for nearly a decade exclusively by Russian Soyuz spacecraft, until private American vehicles joined them from 2020 under the Commercial Crew programme.

The station serves as a laboratory for microgravity research — from materials science to long-term studies of how weightlessness affects the human body, as in the year-long flight of Scott Kelly and Mikhail Kornienko (2015–2016). NASA and its partner agencies plan to end operations around 2030 with a controlled descent, using a specially developed deorbit vehicle, into an uninhabited area of the Pacific Ocean.