But in the worst case scenario, we have no control. Instead, the station will pass through the atmosphere. Sure, many pieces will likely end up in the ocean, but some may hit people, perhaps in a city. The station could collapse across thousands of miles and across multiple continents. This would be extremely tough to predict. As NASA put it: “Computing the probability that penetration will result in a cascade of loss of deorbitability requires a very large range of variables, which makes predictions ineffective.”
This will almost certainly not happen to the ISS. At the same time, this is a much more extreme version Just the way an American space station has ever fallen. In 1979, after years in empty orbit, Skylab, America’s first space station, began to fall toward the atmosphere, where it was in danger of falling and dropping molten spacecraft parts on Earth. At that point, NASA officials had to remotely wake up their computers and, with only confined control over the station, direct it to a location that would endanger the least amount of people.
In previous months, space agency officials had been in regular contact with the State Department, which had disseminated the latest projected trajectories to embassies around the world. In situations like this oops is not enough: when one of the Salyuts, a model of a Soviet space station, was deorbited a few decades ago, burning pieces were scattered across Argentina, causing fear among people and, according to local newspaper reports, at least several firefighters had to be dispatched.
The ISS is much larger than Saluts or Skylab. During an uncontrolled deorbitation, pieces of debris “the size of a car or a train,” say experts on the official advisory committee of the ISS space station, will fall from the sky. NASA confirms that this would pose a “significant risk to society worldwide.”
OK – it’s a nightmare over. This is the end of my anxiety spiral. Here are the facts for 2026:
As far as WIRED can tell, no one has ever died from being hit by a piece of a space station. Some pieces of Skylab did fall on a remote part of Western Australia, and Jimmy Carter issued a formal apology, but no one was injured. The chances of the piece ending up in a populated area are low. Most of the world is ocean and most of the land is uninhabited. In 2024, a piece of space debris ejected from the ISS survived atmospheric burn, fell from the sky, and crashed onto the roof of a house belonging to a very real and rightfully concerned Florida man. He tweeted about it and then sued NASA, but he was not injured.
For this story, WIRED reviewed dozens of NASA documents, including contingency plans and contingency plans, and spoke to more than a dozen people, including three astronauts who have visited the ISS, and no one seemed to This scared. One astronaut said the most disturbing scenario he could think of while in orbit was having a toothache. There have been a few emergencies on the ISS, including the first-ever medical evacuation in January, but overall the situation has been remarkably stable. In fact, one of the most impressive things about the ISS is that nothing very dramatic has ever happened to it. No experiment was too crazy. It was not hit by an asteroid.