Elon Musk Urges Destruction of $150 Billion NASA Space Station Amid Grave Safety Fears for Astronauts
Elon Musk, the ISS, and the Battle for Space’s Future
In the spring of 2025, a single tweet from Elon Musk sent shockwaves through the global space community.
“It is time to begin preparations for deorbiting the @Space_Station. It has served its purpose. There is very little incremental utility. Let’s go to Mars.”
The words, broadcast to millions on X (formerly Twitter), were more than just a billionaire’s opinion—they were a call to action. Within hours, news outlets around the world blared headlines: Elon Musk Calls to Destroy NASA’s $150 Billion Space Station, Citing ‘Serious Concerns’ for Astronauts’ Safety.
But this was only the latest twist in a saga that had been building for years.
The Aging Giant in the Sky
The International Space Station (ISS) was launched in 1998, a crowning achievement of international cooperation. Five of the world’s biggest space agencies—NASA, Roscosmos, ESA, JAXA, and CSA—had built a laboratory in orbit, visited by more than 280 astronauts from 23 countries. The ISS was meant to last 15 years, but its mission had been extended, first to 2020, then to 2024, and most recently, to 2030.
By 2025, the ISS was an aging titan. Its modules, especially the Russian-built Zvezda service module, were showing signs of fatigue. Minor leaks had become more frequent, and the risks of catastrophic failure grew with every passing year.
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SpaceX, Musk’s private rocket company, had become the backbone of NASA’s ISS missions, ferrying astronauts and cargo on reusable rockets. In a historic move, the Biden administration had awarded SpaceX the contract to build the vehicle that would safely deorbit the ISS at the end of its life, guiding it into a remote patch of the Pacific Ocean.
But for Musk, even 2030 was too long to wait.
The Whistleblower
The tipping point came not from Musk himself, but from Casey Handmer, a former NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory employee. On X, Handmer sounded the alarm:
“The ISS’s structural integrity is far more marginal than is being publicly discussed. We are having multiple, and increasingly frequent, leaks from heavily fatigued node segments in the Russian section. When aluminum gets flexed it fatigues and gets harder, increasing its brittleness… It could also depressurize in less than a minute.”
Handmer’s warnings painted a grim picture: a slow leak might give astronauts time to close hatches and retreat to safer sections, but a sudden depressurization could be fatal. Russia, for its part, had already signaled plans to leave the ISS partnership after 2025.
Musk, never one to let a crisis go to waste, seized on Handmer’s claims.
“There are potentially serious concerns about the long-term safety of the @Space_Station. Some parts of it are simply getting too old and obviously that risk grows over time,” he posted. “Even though @SpaceX earns billions of dollars from transporting astronauts & cargo to the ISS, I nonetheless would like to go on record recommending that it be de-orbited within 2 years.”
A Divided World
The reaction was immediate and polarized.
Supporters praised Musk’s candor and vision, arguing that clinging to the ISS was both dangerous and a waste of resources. Critics, including astronauts and politicians, accused him of grandstanding—using safety as a smokescreen for his own ambitions.
