This Is the Worst Thing That Could Happen to the International Space Station
But in the worst case scenario, we have no control. Instead, the station will pierce the atmosphere. Of course, many pieces will likely end up in the ocean, but some could affect people, possibly in a town or city. The station could shatter thousands of kilometers and across several continents. This would be extremely difficult to predict. As NASA puts it, “Calculating the probability that this penetration will result in a loss of deorbit capacity involves a very wide range of variables, making predictions ineffective.”
This certainly won’t happen to the ISS. At the same time, it is a much more extreme version of only how an American space station collapsed. In 1979, after years in orbit, Skylab, America’s first space station, began sinking toward the atmosphere, where it threatened to fall and drop molten parts of spacecraft on Earth. At this point, NASA officials had to wake up their computers remotely and, with limited control of the station, direct them to a location that would put the fewest humans at risk.
In previous months, space agency officials were in frequent contact with the State Department, which broadcast the latest planned trajectories to embassies around the world. In these situations, oops That’s not enough: When one of the Salyuts, a model of a Soviet space station, was de-orbited a few decades ago, flaming pieces were spread across Argentina, frightening people and requiring the deployment of at least a few firefighters, according to local newspapers.
The ISS is much larger than Salyuts or Skylab. During an uncontrolled deorbit, debris “the size of a car or train,” experts on the official ISS space station advisory committee say, will fall from the sky. NASA confirms that this would pose “a significant risk to the public worldwide.”
OK, the nightmare is on. Thus ends my anxiety spiral. Here are the facts as they stand in 2026:
According to WIRED, no one has ever died because a piece of a space station hit them. Some pieces of Skylab fell on a remote part of Western Australia and Jimmy Carter officially apologized, but no one was hurt. The chances of a piece hitting a populated area are low. Most of the world is oceans and most land is uninhabited. In 2024, space junk ejected from the ISS survived atmospheric combustion, fell through the sky, and crashed onto the roof of a house owned by a very real and rightly disturbed Florida man. He tweeted about it and then sued NASA, but he wasn’t hurt.
For this story, WIRED reviewed dozens of NASA documents, including backup plans and emergency contingencies, and spoke to more than a dozen people, including three astronauts who visited the ISS, and no one seemed that panic. One astronaut said the most worrying scenario that crossed his mind while in orbit was having a toothache. The ISS has experienced a few emergencies, including a first-ever medical evacuation in January, but overall the situation has remained remarkably stable. In fact, one of the most impressive things about the ISS is that nothing very dramatic has ever happened to it. No experience was too messed up. It was not hit by an asteroid.
