The End Of The International Space Station

What goes up must come down and that is true even if the thing going up is as big as a football pitch and weighs 400 tonnes but after circling the Earth every 90 minutes since 1998, plans are being made to bring the International Space Station to as graceful a decent as you can make for something which is travelling at 17,500 mph and heavier than 250 elephants.
Our record with bringing down massive hulks of Space Station isn't great, Skylab overshot the Indian Ocean and Aussies in the Western part of Australia were picking bits of it out of their garden and the Soviet era Salyut 7 unexpectedly found it's new earthly home to be the lot less Ocean-like Argentina   
As getting the calculations even slightly wrong could result in people waking up and saying i'm sure there used to a country between Austria and Romania, they have started the planning stage 8 years before what they hope is the splashdown in the Pacific in 2031 using a Space-Tug which is using another space-craft to gradually nudge it back into the Earth's thicker atmosphere where it will slowed down by atmospheric drag before plopping down in the Pacific between New Zealand and South America.
'It is a significant challenge' says NASA, 'A 400-tonne object falling out of the sky at Orbital Speeds is not great' but they think that after the re-entry forces does it's thing to melt and disintegrate large sections of it, what is left of it will be significantly less and pose no risk to human life although the 'we think' bit isn't a confidence filler.
If you happen to find yourself drifting across a seemingly uninhabited expanse of the Pacific in 2031, keep an eye out for a shower of molten hot debris raining down on Earth from space and if you are in New Zealand, you may want to keep your pets out of the garden that day.