This is the worst thing that could happen to the International Space Station

But in the worst case scenario, we have no control. Instead, the station will penetrate the atmosphere. Sure, many of the pieces will likely end up in the ocean, but some may infect people, perhaps in a town or city. The station can be scattered across thousands of miles and multiple continents. This will be very difficult to predict. As NASA says: “Calculating the probability that such a breach will lead to deorbit loss has too many variables, making predictions ineffective.”

This will almost certainly not happen to the International Space Station. At the same time, it’s a much more extreme version of only The way the US space station ever went down. In 1979, after years spent vacant in orbit, Skylab, America’s first space station, began plummeting toward the atmosphere, where it threatened to fall apart and drop molten spacecraft parts to Earth. At that point, NASA officials had to activate its computers remotely and direct it, with only limited control over the station, to a location that would put the least amount of humans at risk.

In the months leading up to that, space agency officials were in frequent contact with the State Department, which published the latest projected paths for embassies around the world. In these situations, Ooops It’s not just that: When one of the Salyut stations, a model of a Soviet space station, de-orbited a few decades ago, flaming pieces were scattered across Argentina, panicking people and requiring the deployment of at least a few firefighters, according to local newspaper reports.

The International Space Station is much larger than Salyuts or Skylab. In an out-of-control orbit, pieces of debris “the size of a car or a train” would fall from the sky. NASA asserts that this would pose “a significant risk to the public around the world.”

Well, the nightmare it is more. And thus ends my anxiety-filled spiral. Here are the facts as they stand in 2026:

As far as WIRED can tell, no one has ever died from a piece of the space station colliding with them. Some pieces of Skylab fell on a remote area in Western Australia, and Jimmy Carter formally apologized, but no one was hurt. The odds of a piece hitting a populated area are low. Most of the world is ocean, and most of the land is uninhabited. In the year 2024, a piece of space junk ejected from the International Space Station survives atmospheric burnout, falls through the sky, and crashes on the roof of a house belonging to a very real, troubled man from Florida. He tweeted about it and then filed a lawsuit against NASA, but was unharmed.

For this story, WIRED reviewed dozens of NASA documents, including backup plans and contingencies for emergency situations, and spoke to more than a dozen people, including three astronauts who have visited the International Space Station. Which panic. One astronaut said the most worrying scenario he could think of while in orbit was having a toothache. The International Space Station has seen some emergencies, including the first-ever medical evacuation in January, but overall things have been remarkably stable. In fact, one of the most impressive things about the International Space Station is that nothing dramatic has ever happened to it. No experiment has ever failed so often. It was not hit by an asteroid.