Elon Musk calls for deorbiting of the ISS. Here's what the space station does

WASHINGTON -- Elon Musk called this week for the deorbiting of the International Space Station (ISS) "as soon as possible."

"It is time to begin preparations for deorbiting the [ISS]," Musk wrote in a post on X on Thursday. "It has served its purpose. There is very little incremental utility. Let's go to Mars."

In a follow-up post, Musk said he was planning to recommend to President Donald Trump that the station be brought down "as soon as possible" and that the 2030 timeline for deorbiting be moved up to two years from now.

Space experts told ABC News the ISS is very important in conducting scientific research, developing technologies, promoting STEM education and fostering diplomatic relationships. Deorbiting the station prematurely could end important innovations and studies pertaining to future space missions.

"It is just giving us great data on living and working in space, longitudinally, which will apply directly to our plans to return to the moon and then go on to Mars," Jordan Bimm, space historian and professor of science communication at the University of Chicago, told ABC News. "So, it has a diplomatic purpose. It has an experiential purpose, and then obviously, it has these scientific and technological development purposes as well."

"It'd be a shame to cut this short for a non-technical reason, but for rather sort of political reason," he added.

Research and technology development in microgravity

In the 24 years that the ISS has been in orbit, there have been more than 4,000 experiments conducted, according to NASA.

Research is conducted across several disciplines, including biology, earth sciences, human health and physical science, the federal space agency said.

The microgravity of space allows experiments to be performed in a way that is unable to be replicated on Earth due to the planet's gravity.

Bimm said he believes one of the most important findings to come out of ISS research is how living and working in microgravity for extended periods of time affects the human body.

"We have found by studying astronauts living and working, by doing self-experiments on the scientists and astronauts on board, that microgravity affects the body in lots of deleterious ways," he said. "That leads to your bone loss, muscle loss, changes in the fluid inside our bodies that are normally being pulled down by Earth's gravity, changes to the eye and vision loss and things like that."

He went on, "We have gotten good data on how that progresses over time, and importantly, we have developed countermeasures for these things as well, including resistance training or running on a treadmill, things like that that we wouldn't have without the ISS, without this platform where humans can spend long periods of time consistently and be studied In a scientific setting."

He said continuing to study this will be important for future space missions, including future moon missions under the Artemis program and eventual missions to Mars.

David Alexander, director of the Rice Space Institute at Rice University in Houston, told ABC News there has also been the development of technologies and materials on the ISS that would benefit not only long-term space missions but life on Earth.

This field, called space manufacturing, includes DNA sequencing, developing new water purification systems and even drug development.

"The unique environment of space allows us to perhaps develop pure pharmaceuticals. People have been working on creating high-purity fiber optic cables that would speed up communications here on Earth," he said. "In space manufacturing, some of it will be for use in space but some of it is the market is here on the ground, to take those technologies and bring them to bear on, that affect our daily lives here on planet Earth."

Encouraging STEM education

The ISS also participates in education programs that help students learn about science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM).

This includes providing students the opportunity to speak directly with crew members living and working aboard the ISS via amateur radio, participating in virtual missions, learning space experiments that can be done at home and challenging students to design experiments that solve space exploration problems with DNA analysis.

"Astronauts will frequently do teleconferences with classrooms, Q and As," Bimm said. "Having a terrestrial scientist come into your class, communicating with astronauts on orbit in the ISS imprints on the minds of young people in such a powerful way that this is another one of these like superpowers that we would lose if we lost the ISS."

Alexander said NASA and the ISS work to communicate with adults as well, with the Rice Space Institute hosting a recent conversation between Olympic athletes and astronauts on the ISS.

He said the conversation encompassed topics such as work ethic, human performance, parallels between space and sports and the importance of international collaboration.

"I think it's really, really important and, of course, that's why NASA, in particular, spends a huge amount of time in allowing their astronauts to be accessible to the general public," he said.

Improving diplomatic relations

The ISS is maintained by five space agencies and their contractors including NASA, the Canadian Space Agency, the European Space Agency, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency and Roscosmos in Russia.

In the 1990s, the U.S. proposed combining the American and Russian space programs following the collapse of the Soviet Union, and stalling on individual projects, to build the new space station.

"We can definitely talk about all the different science and technology development that's happening there, but it also serves a diplomatic purpose bringing together different nations in space for such a long-term project," Bimm said. "It really did represent this like post-Cold War moment where the U.S. and Russia and international partners could cooperate in space."

NASA says the ISS has been visited by astronauts from 18 different countries to collaborate in space, helping in the construction, assembly and operation of the ISS.

Every partner country manages and runs the hardware it provides to the ISS, according to NASA.

"That allowed us to foster much stronger partnerships with countries around the world and thinking about space technology development and space exploration," Alexander said.

The video in the player above is from a previous report.