International Space Station program ocean was found to be possible only with Russia's assistance. At the time ISS was launched, the Russian Space Agency had experience from de-orbiting the Salyut 4, 5, 6, and 7 space stations, while NASA's first intentional controlled de-orbit of a satellite (the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory) would not occur for another two years. NASA currently has no spacecraft capable of de-orbiting the ISS at the time of decommissioning. Skylab, the only space station built and launched entirely by the US, decayed from orbit slowly over 5 years, and no attempt was made to de-orbit the station using a deorbital
Chinese large modular space station Chinese large modular space station The Chinese large modular space station is a planned space station to be placed in Low Earth orbit. The planned Chinese Space Station will be roughly one-fifth the mass of the International Space Station and about the size of the decommissioned Russian Mir space station. The Chinese station is expected to have a mass between 80 to 100 metric tons. Operations will be controlled from the Beijing Aerospace Command and Control Center in China. The planned launch date of the core module, the "Tianhe-1" (“Harmony of the Heavens”), is 2020. In 2017, the Chinese launched