Nasa has selected Elon Musk’s SpaceX company to bring down the International Space Station at the end of its life.
The California-based company will build a vehicle capable of pushing the 430-tonne orbiting platform into the Pacific Ocean early in the next decade.
A contract for the work, valued at up to $843m (£668m), was announced on Wednesday.
The first elements of the space station were launched in 1998, with continuous crewed operations beginning in 2000.
The station circles the Earth every 90 minutes at an altitude just above 400km (250 miles) and has been home to thousands of scientific experiments, investigating all manner of phenomena from the aging process in humans to the formula for new types of materials.
