It’s cold, dark and isolated here, with dead satellites scattered across the vastness. This is where spacecraft are shunted off to at the end of their operational lives — two places, actually, very far apart. Both are graveyards.
“Graveyard orbit,” tens of thousands of kilometers above Earth, is for satellites operating at the highest altitudes. The “spacecraft graveyard,” on the other hand, lies in the South Pacific Ocean — 4 kilometers deep, twice the area of North America and farther from humans than anywhere on the planet.
Both locations help keep working orbits cleaner by preventing defunct spacecraft from adding to the level of dangerous debris, like cars broken down on an expressway. Most satellites launched today, and their launch vehicles, are designed so they can be directed toward a graveyard or can fall back into Earth’s atmosphere and burn up on their own in a timely fashion. These two out-of-the-way places are seen as a safe solution, for now, to one of many space junk challenges.
“Obviously, in the long term, graveyards aren’t ideal because you’re just piling up junk somewhere else and eventually that junk will start colliding and producing more debris,” Marlon Sorge, a senior technical fellow with The Aerospace Corp., told Apogee. “It’s possible that in the future, if we have in-space servicing and manufacturing, you might be able to reuse some of them. Graveyards we use when we don’t have a better alternative. It’s better than leaving them in the operational orbits that we really need to use.”
What’s more, a January 2024 conference sponsored by the European Space Agency (ESA) called for more research into the possible effects of satellite reentry and incineration on Earth’s atmosphere. New measurements by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) show that about 10% of aerosol particles in Earth’s atmosphere contain aluminum and other metals from spacecraft reentry. In the right conditions, NOAA said, aerosols can promote ozone-destroying chemical reactions.
What a spacecraft is made from helps determine whether pieces survive and fall to Earth as it breaks up in the atmosphere. This is why NASA and the ESA are replacing titanium with aluminum, which has a lower melting point, in the manufacture of fuel tanks. Another factor is sheer size. The bigger the pieces, the bigger the chance they hit Earth. And the biggest space disposal job ever is approaching in 2031 with the planned deorbiting of the International Space Station, or ISS.
Launched in 1998, the ISS was scheduled to operate through 2015. Its date with the satellite graveyard has been delayed twice as new research opportunities using the station arose. Still, the ISS has always had a close connection with the graveyard: Several times a day, as they orbit overhead, the astronauts aboard come nearer this isolated expanse of ocean than any other humans. They’re some 400 kilometers up. The inhabited point of land closest to the center of the graveyard is about 2,700 kilometers away.
NASA has awarded SpaceX $843 million to develop and deliver a vehicle to deorbit the soccer pitch-sized space station and “ensure avoidance of risk to populated areas,” a June 2024 agency news release said. Decommissioning will involve a combination of natural orbital descent, intentional lowering of the station using existing propulsion, and a reentry maneuver for final targeting to minimize the debris footprint, NASA said at its website. Once all crew are back on Earth, small maneuvers will line up the final track and operators on the ground will execute a large reentry burn — the final push.
Mir as a model
You can get an idea of the physics involved in the ISS disposal, Sorge said, by looking back to the swan song for the ISS predecessor — Mir, the Soviet Union space station deorbited in March 2001. During its 15 years of service, Mir, the largest spacecraft of its time, was plagued with problems but laid the groundwork for the international cooperation that became the hallmark of the ISS. Mir underwent a controlled reentry just as the first components of the ISS were being assembled on orbit.
A video animation highlighted at a NASA history webpage shows the Mir deorbiting process. Over the course of a half-dozen orbits, Mir — shaped like an X on a stick with 10 horizontal solar panels protruding from it — makes a steep descent straight toward Earth’s upper atmosphere. At about 100 kilometers, the spacecraft heats up red and begins to tumble out of control. At about 50 kilometers, the thin solar panels fall away, then the main body — a core and five research modules — breaks into pieces that burst into flame as they fall. Debris, including a dozen fireballs, survives the reentry and streaks toward the spacecraft graveyard. Some 25 tons splashed down in the ocean.
Russia prepared carefully for deorbiting and reentry, according to a NASA account. One cargo ship was sent out to position Mir and another followed a year later carrying propellant for deorbit burns. Concerns ran high that pieces of the blue whale-sized station would hit populated areas when it fell, and news reports drew a global audience. Russians took out a $200 million insurance policy to cover potential damages, NBC News reported, while airlines rerouted Pacific flights and alerts went out in nations from Japan to Chile. Cosmonauts who had served aboard Mir traveled to Fiji to watch. In the end, observers praised Russia for the operation’s precision.
Three decades later, in 2031, the world will have grown more accustomed to space junk falling to Earth, but the return of the ISS — a partnership of five space agencies from 15 countries — promises an even greater spectacle. The station has been conducting groundbreaking research and operations continually since 2000, circling Earth every 90 minutes, according to its NASA webpage. It has expanded over the years through 42 assembly flights to house a crew of seven or more, with living and working space the size of a six-bedroom home. The ISS consists of a truss that acts as a backbone and attachments including solar arrays, radiators and research modules.
A schematic diagram of the station shows dozens of major component parts, most of them destined for a return toward Earth six years from now. A solicitation for reusing some of its aging modules drew no commercial interest, NASA said. Some smaller components may be preserved for display by the Smithsonian Institution. The station weighs three times more than Mir.
At 37 million square kilometers, the spacecraft graveyard appears big enough to handle the job. Not all space debris that hits these waters or anywhere else on Earth is tracked or recorded, Sorge noted. One example is rocket stages that drop back to Earth after launch. But a 2017 report in the publication Business Insider Italia said spacefaring entities such as the European states, Japan, Russia and the U.S. had sunk more than 263 pieces of space debris into the spacecraft graveyard since 1971.
At its center is Point Nemo, a dot on a map identified in 1992 by Croatian-born engineer and cartographer Hrvoje Lukatela. A fan of 19th-century science fiction author Jules Verne, Lukatela named the point for Verne’s enigmatic Captain Nemo, “who vowed to spend his days navigating the seven seas, never to set his foot on dry land again,” Lukatela said in a 2015 interview. “The name therefore seemed to me to be appropriate for that point on the world’s oceans that is most distant from any land.” Nearby, in Verne’s stories, Nemo holed up with his submarine Nautilus at fictional Lincoln Island. The ocean expanse also is home to the ancient sunken city of R’lyeh in the stories of horror writer H.P. Lovecraft.
Technically, Point Nemo is known as the Oceanic Pole of Inaccessibility. The entire spacecraft graveyard is sometimes identified by these names. The graveyard overlaps a region known as both the South Pacific Ocean Uninhabited Area and the South Pacific Gyre — the largest of Earth’s oceanic deserts. There are no life-promoting nutrients washing in from land here because there is no land, noted a 2019 report by the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology in Bremen, Germany.
Lacking nutrients, minute algae in the gyre subsist on hydrogen and are found only at depths below 100 meters. This makes the surface waters some of the bluest and clearest among all the oceans. “Due to its remoteness and enormous size,” the study noted, “it is also one of the least-studied regions on our planet.” Its only regular visitors are scientists and ocean racers. Still, its microorganisms “contribute significantly to global biogeochemical cycles,” the study said. And even a place “truly in the middle of nowhere” still is traversed by occasional sponges, sea stars, squids, octopi, whales, viperfish, other types of fish, crustaceans and other marine life — all deserving of consideration in evaluating human use of the area, according to the 2019 paper “From Outer Space to Ocean Depths,” written by researchers from Norway and Italy and published in the California Western International Law Journal.
A big footprint
The Mir deorbiting showed that pieces of a large, man-made space object don’t hit the ocean in tight assembly but can scatter, in more of an oval pattern, from one side of the spacecraft graveyard to the other. Mir left a debris trail some 3,000 kilometers long and 100 kilometers wide. The graveyard is subject to no state jurisdiction, but space agencies typically provide advance notice of a reentry to aviation and maritime authorities in Chile and New Zealand. The two nations share responsibility for traffic in the remote stretch of ocean and issue warnings to pilots and merchant vessels to avoid the area.
Space interests downplay the hazard risk from spacecraft reentry, wherever it may occur. “As these are rare events,” reads a Q&A from the ESA, “and as about 75% of the Earth’s surface is covered by water while large portions of land area are uninhabited, the risk for any single individual is several orders of magnitude smaller than commonly accepted risks, such as those encountered when driving a car, taken in day-to-day life.” The U.S. government’s Orbital Debris Mitigation Standard Practices (ODMSP) say that the risk of human casualty from falling space debris should not exceed 1 in 10,000. For comparison, the National Weather Service puts the chance of being struck by lightning during an 80-year human lifetime at 1 in 15,000.
As a rare event, space debris hitting Earth often makes news, even though no serious injuries have been reported. The failed Soviet Venus exploration mission Cosmos 482 had the world watching in May 2025 as its landing capsule finally fell from orbit after five decades. The 1-meter-wide sphere had been designed to survive the scorching atmosphere of the second planet and it was believed to have splashed down intact in the Indian Ocean. No recovery mission was announced.
NASA reported in May 2025 that it is still trying to figure out why a 1-square-meter piece of carbon fiber-reinforced polymer composite failed to burn up before it landed with other debris from a returning Dragon X crew capsule three years earlier in southwestern Australia. Debris from SpaceX missions also has landed in Washington state and Uganda. In 1991, pieces of the Soviets’ railroad car-sized Salyut 7 space station fell in a rain of fire on a sparsely populated area in the Argentinian Andes to end a month of suspense worldwide over where it would land. In 1979, after just two years on orbit, NASA’s Skylab space station fell from orbit in pieces that hit the Indian Ocean and western Australia. Many were placed on display in Australian museums.
Older space missions ended with reentries that were uncontrolled, where atmospheric drag slowly causes an object’s orbit to fall until it makes a final plunge to Earth. This can occur anywhere along the orbit, so operators don’t know where debris will land. Controlled or direct reentry, the norm for today’s satellites, uses propulsion from an engine burn to put the object on a specific trajectory designed to reenter at a known location — usually over the ocean. Smithsonian Observatory astrophysicist Jonathan McDowell, writing at his closely followed website Jonathan’s Space Pages, draws a clear distinction between the two methods: “Even if a satellite is working, if it doesn’t have propulsion, it is effectively space junk from the point of view of other space objects and from the point of view of orbital disposal.”
“Most days, something is coming back that’s intact — satellites, upper rocket stages, something like that,” said Sorge of The Aerospace Corp., who is executive director in Albuquerque, New Mexico, of Aerospace’s Center for Orbital and Reentry Debris Studies. The Aerospace Corp. is a federally funded research and development center whose chief customers include the Space Force’s Space Systems Command.
The advisory Interagency Space Debris Coordinating Committee (IADC), a group of 13 international space agencies, establishes guidelines for responsible disposal and has a process for sharing predictions on when to expect reentry of large, uncontrolled, often older objects. It’s up to individual nations and organizations to establish and enforce any resulting regulations. “As far as a coordinated response, there really isn’t one,” Sorge said. “Different countries have different procedures … partly because it’s just difficult to predict exactly that an object is going to come back at any distance or time — to say, ‘Look out here, or look out here.’” One overarching IADC standard that has been widely adopted is removing objects from orbit within 25 years after the end of their operational lives.
Compliance with disposal guidelines and regulations has risen with the proliferation of satellite internet constellations such as Starlink and OneWeb, Sorge said. Like space stations and most other satellites, these constellations operate in low Earth orbit (LEO), at altitudes from 100 kilometers to 2,000 kilometers. “Some satellites are low enough down that they’ll just reenter all by themselves within the general 25 years that we use,” Sorge said. “But the introduction of a lot of these large constellations has significantly improved some of the compliance rates because of the way they operate and how they were designed, the fact that they were thinking about this. Even in the cases where they could naturally decay in the right amount of time, they’re often doing better than that — purposely forcing satellites down to get them out of the way.”
With no propulsion to boost them, any man-made space objects below about 1,000 kilometers will reenter Earth’s atmosphere within a few hundred years in space, according to a Q&A at The Aerospace Corp. webpage. Objects in the lowest orbits might reenter in just a few months. For orbits from 1,000 kilometers to 2,500 kilometers, reentry may take thousands of years — and much longer above that altitude.
Chicken Little time?
Even as space grows more crowded, the impact from falling debris doesn’t warrant a response like Chicken Little’s from the folktale. Studies place the total mass worldwide since the beginning of the Space Age at roughly that of a single, large naval destroyer. “You think about all these things coming back, but because they’re all spacecraft, compared to ships, they’re not that heavy,” Sorge said. “There’s often questions about how much of a problem this is causing. And the answer is, compared to all the ships we’ve lost, not very much.”
There’s little danger for now that defunct spacecraft in the highest orbits will fall on our heads. But getting them out of the way still is important to prevent collisions and safeguard life on Earth. These orbits are home to satellites providing communications, broadcasting, weather forecasting, national security and GPS. IADC guidelines call for satellites sent to graveyard orbit to remain out of the way there for at least 100 years. A satellite in one higher lane, known as geostationary orbit or GEO, rotates with Earth at an altitude of about 36,000 kilometers and generally is locked onto a single point near the equator. Graveyard orbits have been established above and below this altitude, but the graveyard orbit most heavily used lies some 300 kilometers beyond it.
Why there? “You’re playing some kind of balancing game,” Sorge said. “Ideally, if you’re going to do a graveyard, the farther away you would go, generally, the better. Particularly in GEO. But it costs fuel. And nobody wants to do that. Then there are lanes of traffic above and below GEO that satellites use if they want to move from one part of GEO to another. So the idea is [to] keep most of the stuff up away from those, but not so far away that it’s going to cost a lot of fuel.”
Another consideration is that satellites placed in graveyard orbit, also known as GEO disposal orbit or as “storage,” aren’t likely to remain in place. That makes it more difficult to establish clear guidelines for satellite operators to follow. “The graveyards are defined by where you’re not going rather than where you are going,” Sorge said. “If you’re moving your satellite somewhere and then it’s going to be dead — you’re getting rid of all the extra fuel and just shutting the thing down — you can’t control it anymore. It’s just going to do whatever the physics is going to make it do, which is seldom just staying in one nice orbit. The things in GEO disposal orbit wander around.”
Collisions and the debris they cause is less of a concern in GEO than in LEO, in part because there are fewer spacecraft, they’re moving slower and they’re traveling in the same direction. “If you’re in the operating GEO orbit, you’re moving with the surface of the Earth. When you’re in one of the graveyard orbits, it will be a little bit different than that.”
Compliance with guidelines and regulations has improved in GEO as it has in LEO, Sorge said, because spacefaring nations are learning about the potential hazards from orbiting more and more spacecraft. “It’s typically above 90%, which is good,” he said. “It’s taken a while to get to that point. And it was one of the very early rules that everyone kind of agreed to.” One reason for the delay was the development time required to help spacecraft meet these standards.
Advances in research also are helping provide alternatives to graveyards and to extra fuel use in disposing of satellites from higher altitudes. More reentry options are included in a 2019 update to the ODMSP.
“There are some fancy astrodynamics taking advantage of the sun and the moon’s gravity that can make it possible to reenter without a lot of maneuvering,” Sorge said. This is happening naturally with some spacecraft from the earliest space missions, “because that’s what the physics makes them do. The goal would ultimately be to do some of these disposals where you’re planning it that way. The point of (the ODMSP update) was to say, ‘OK, for a long time the only options we had for disposal were graveyards, but now that we’re learning more, we realize there are better options that don’t leave things up there. Let’s start making those possible.’”
In addition, demonstration projects underway in Europe and Japan are launching service satellites to grapple and remove defunct spacecraft from orbit — initially through reentry but someday, by towing them to graveyard orbit, as well.
A future predicted in a 2022 NASA webpage for kids, then, may be coming to pass. Here’s a passage from a presentation there on graveyard orbit, titled “Where Do Old Satellites Go When They Die?”
“Perhaps someday in the future, humans may need to send ‘space garbage trucks’ to clean these up. But for now, at least, they will be out of the way.”