Russia is leaving the International Space Station. Not with a dramatic walkout or a geopolitical ultimatum, but through something far more mundane and arguably more dangerous: the slow, grinding decay of hardware that has been in orbit for a quarter century. The modules are leaking. The patches aren’t holding. And the timeline for departure — once vaguely pegged to 2028 or later — is now accelerating in ways that could reshape human spaceflight for a generation.
According to BBC News, Roscosmos chief Yuri Borisov confirmed that Russia’s segment of the ISS is deteriorating faster than expected, with air leaks in the station’s Russian modules becoming an increasingly serious operational concern. The agency is now actively preparing to launch its own orbital station — the Russian Orbital Service Station, or ROSS — as a replacement, with initial modules potentially reaching orbit by the late 2020s. But that schedule is ambitious even by the standards of a space program that hasn’t launched a new crewed module in years.
The ISS has been continuously occupied since November 2000. Twenty-four years of human habitation, uninterrupted. It is, by any measure, one of the most extraordinary engineering achievements in history — a football-field-sized laboratory hurtling through low Earth orbit at 17,500 miles per hour, built and maintained through a partnership between the United States, Russia, Europe, Japan, and Canada that survived wars, sanctions, diplomatic crises, and the collapse of the Soviet Union’s successor state into something no one in 1998 could have predicted.
That partnership is now fraying at its most literal, physical level.
The air leaks in Russia’s segment have been a known issue for years, but their severity has escalated. NASA and Roscosmos have repeatedly applied fixes to the PrK tunnel connecting the Zvezda service module to a docking port, but the cracks keep propagating. In late 2024, NASA’s Office of Inspector General flagged the leaks as one of the highest risks to continued ISS operations, noting that the rate of air loss had increased significantly. The affected section has been largely sealed off, with hatches closed to limit the bleed of atmosphere into space. But closing hatches on a space station is like closing rooms in a house with a crumbling foundation — it buys time, not solutions.
Borisov’s comments, reported by BBC News, frame Russia’s departure not as a choice but as an inevitability driven by material reality. “The technical condition of the Russian segment is such that we need to be very careful,” he said, adding that Roscosmos is working to ensure a transition period where ROSS can begin operations before the ISS is fully deorbited.
NASA, for its part, has been planning for the ISS’s retirement since at least 2020, when it began soliciting proposals for commercial space stations to succeed the government-run outpost. SpaceX won a contract worth up to $843 million to build and fly the vehicle that will deorbit the ISS — a modified Dragon spacecraft designed to push the station into a controlled reentry over the Pacific Ocean. The current target date for that final plunge is 2030, though the leaks in the Russian segment could force a reassessment.
And here’s where it gets complicated.
The ISS isn’t just a single structure. It’s two interconnected segments — one American, one Russian — that depend on each other in fundamental ways. Russia’s modules provide propulsion and attitude control. America’s side provides the bulk of the electrical power through its massive solar arrays. Separating the two isn’t like uncoupling train cars. It would require years of engineering work that hasn’t been done and, frankly, may never be done. So when Russia leaves, the whole station goes.
This mutual dependency was once seen as a feature, not a bug. During the Cold War’s aftermath, binding the American and Russian space programs together was an explicit policy goal — a way to keep Russian rocket scientists employed and pointed toward peaceful purposes rather than proliferating missile technology. The ISS was, in a very real sense, a nonproliferation program disguised as a science lab. It worked. For decades, it worked beautifully.
Now that architecture of interdependence has become a vulnerability. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 strained the partnership to its breaking point, though cooperation aboard the station continued even as relations on the ground collapsed. Astronauts and cosmonauts kept sharing meals, running experiments, and conducting spacewalks together — a surreal tableau of normalcy 250 miles above a war zone. But the political will to extend that cooperation indefinitely has evaporated on both sides.
Russia’s plan for ROSS is, on paper, straightforward. A smaller station than the ISS, designed for a crew of two to four, operating in a higher-inclination orbit that would give it better coverage of Russian territory. Roscosmos has said the first module could launch by 2027, with the station becoming operational by 2030. But Russia’s space budget has been squeezed by military spending, Western sanctions have cut off access to key electronic components, and the country’s track record on major space projects in recent years — including the repeatedly delayed Angara rocket and the long-troubled Vostochny Cosmodrome — gives ample reason for skepticism.
The United States faces its own transition risks. NASA has bet heavily on commercial successors to the ISS, awarding contracts to companies including Axiom Space, Blue Origin, and Vast. Axiom is furthest along, planning to attach its first commercial module to the ISS as early as 2026 before eventually detaching to form a free-flying station. But none of these commercial stations are guaranteed to be operational by 2030. A gap in American access to a permanent orbital laboratory — even a short one — would represent a strategic setback that NASA officials have publicly warned against.
The timing pressure is real. Every month the Russian segment continues to degrade, the risk calculus shifts. A catastrophic leak — one that couldn’t be managed by closing hatches — could force an emergency evacuation and an uncontrolled end to ISS operations. That scenario, while still considered unlikely, is no longer theoretical. NASA has contingency plans, including keeping enough Crew Dragon and Soyuz vehicles docked at the station to evacuate all crew members on short notice. But an unplanned abandonment would mean losing the ability to conduct a controlled deorbit, potentially scattering debris over populated areas.
So the race is on. Not the kind of space race that makes for stirring presidential speeches and Hollywood movies, but a grinding, budget-constrained, bureaucratically complex race to build replacements before the original gives out. It’s more like replacing a bridge while traffic is still flowing over it — except the bridge is moving at Mach 25 and there’s no shoulder to pull over on.
Europe and Japan face their own reckonings. Both have invested billions in ISS hardware and experiments, and neither has an independent path to a crewed station. The European Space Agency has been exploring partnerships with commercial providers and has expressed interest in participating in whatever comes next, but ESA’s budget is a fraction of NASA’s, and member-state politics make rapid decisions difficult. Japan’s JAXA is in a similar position, though it has been investing in commercial partnerships and its own cargo vehicle capabilities.
China, notably, already has its answer. The Tiangong space station has been continuously crewed since 2022, giving Beijing an operational outpost in low Earth orbit that doesn’t depend on anyone else’s hardware or goodwill. If the ISS goes offline before Western commercial stations are ready, China will be the only nation with a permanent human presence in space. That prospect has not gone unnoticed in Washington.
The geopolitical implications extend beyond symbolism. Low Earth orbit is increasingly contested — militarily, commercially, and scientifically. The ability to maintain a persistent human presence there confers advantages in Earth observation, materials science, pharmaceutical research, and the development of technologies needed for deeper space exploration. Losing that capability, even temporarily, would cede ground that may be difficult to recover.
Back on the station itself, the crew continues to work. Six people, as of this writing, living and conducting research in a structure that is simultaneously one of humanity’s greatest achievements and an aging piece of infrastructure with a ticking clock. They run experiments on protein crystal growth, fluid dynamics in microgravity, and the effects of long-duration spaceflight on the human body. They fix things that break. They monitor the leaks.
The ISS was never meant to last forever. Its original design life was fifteen years. It has now exceeded that by nearly a decade, a testament to the engineering margins built into the original design and the ingenuity of the teams that have maintained it. But materials fatigue. Micrometeorite impacts accumulate. Thermal cycling — the station passes from blazing sunlight to frigid shadow every 45 minutes — slowly weakens structural joints. No amount of maintenance can reverse entropy.
What comes next will define the character of human spaceflight for the 2030s and beyond. A smooth transition to commercial stations would validate NASA’s strategy of seeding private industry and stepping back from owning and operating orbital infrastructure. A botched transition — marked by gaps, delays, and a loss of continuous human presence in orbit — would represent a policy failure with consequences measured in decades, not years.
Russia’s accelerating departure makes the margin for error thinner. The leaks won’t wait for budget cycles, contract negotiations, or launch manifest delays. Physics doesn’t care about policy.
The ISS is ending. The only question is whether what replaces it will be ready in time.
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