Preserving Humanity's Longest Space Outpost Before Its Final Descent

The International Space Station represents humanity's greatest achievement in continuous spaceflight—25 years of uninterrupted human presence beyond Earth. As NASA prepares to deorbit the ISS around 2030, preserving key artifacts has become urgently important; the structure is too vast and complex to keep intact. This debate over what pieces of ISS history to preserve signals a critical moment in memorializing how spaceflight evolved from spectacular achievement to everyday accomplishment.