WASHINGTON, April 28. /TASS/. The International Space Station (ISS) will be deorbited in 2030-2031, US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) head Bill Nelson has said.

"We're going to deorbit it. It is aging. We're going to deorbit it in 2030-31," he said during testimony before the US House of Representatives Science, Space, and Technology Committee.

In his words, further orbital activities will be contracted to private companies.

"We are now giving contracts to several commercial companies to create commercial space stations," Nelson added.

Earlier, the NASA chief told Reuters in an interview that he expected Russian-US cooperation on the ISS project to continue until 2030. NASA’s budget for fiscal year 2024 (the period between October 1, 2023 and September 30, 2024) says that financing for ISS operations will continue until at least 2030.

Earlier this week, Roscosmos Director General Yury Borisov sent letters to partner countries’ space agency chiefs to inform them of Russia’s decision to extend the operation of the International Space Station (ISS) to 2028.

The International Space Station (ISS) has been in orbit since November 20, 1998. It consists of several modules and weighs around 435 tonnes, or even up to 470 tonnes when spacecraft are docked to it. A total of 14 countries are participating in the ISS project: Russia, Canada, the United States, Japan and ten member states of the European Space Agency (ESA) - Belgium, Germany, Denmark, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, France, Sweden and Switzerland.