The International Space Station is heading for deorbit as early as 2030, and curators, astronauts, and space program officials are scrambling to figure out what to save. At a Smithsonian panel on May 21, 2026, participants debated which artifacts capture the station's 74 expeditions and 25 years of continuous human presence. The question is urgent: the last cargo return window closes mid-2029.

NASA acting ISS director Jacob Keaton called the station's greatest achievement turning spaceflight into something "boring" through competence and routine. Astronaut Stephen Bowen, who spent 186 days on the ISS in 2023, said the biggest legacy is keeping international missions going rather than holding onto hardware. Archeologist Justin Walsh pushed for preserving the multilingual onboard library and crew notebooks used for shared instructions.

Curator Jennifer Levasseur flagged the cupola module's iconic view and the galley table where crews gathered as must-save candidates. NASA's Ryan Landon noted that once the deorbit vehicle docks around 2029, no spacecraft will return, forcing hard choices between science samples and heritage pieces. Storage on the final Dragon capsules will be a bitter bottleneck.