The International Space Station just notched a major milestone, but its days are numbered.
Sunday (Nov. 2) marked the 25th anniversary of continuous human occupation of the Dragon cargo capsule to bring it down over an uninhabited stretch of ocean.
And not just any stretch — the "spacecraft cemetery," a patch of the Pacific centered on Point Nemo explainer.
That remoteness explains Point Nemo's appeal to mission planners, who have ditched several hundred big spacecraft there over the decades: If there's no land nearby, there's virtually no chance that chunks of falling, flaming hardware could harm people, buildings or other infrastructure. (You'd have to be a pretty unlucky sailor to get hit in the spacecraft cemetery).
And some pieces of the ISS are likely to survive its blazing reentry.