Even defunct spacecraft need a final resting place. For Russia's Mir space station, as well as hundreds of other spacecraft from the US, Russia, Europe, and Japan, that graveyard is situated around the remote Point Nemo in the South Pacific, east of New Zealand—and it will eventually claim the International Space Station as well. Per Quartz, SpaceX is set to lead the 495-ton space station to a splashdown in the cosmic-themed cemetery in 2030, joining the remnants of Mir and plenty of other spacecraft resting on the ocean floor, in the one spot on Earth that's the farthest from any land.
In 2022, NASA released an update to its transition plan for the ISS, in which the space station will undergo "deorbit" maneuvers to be brought back into the Earth's atmosphere, followed by its eventual burial at sea. Last year, the BBC reported that, between 1971 and 2018, upward of 260 space objects were crashed at Point Nemo, and the remains are likely in better shape than one might expect. The outlet notes that "the waters around Point Nemo are thought to be among the most lifeless on Earth," being "far from land, which tends to leach nutrients into the oceans. This, combined with the natural lack of oxygen in the deep ocean, the freezing temperatures, and total lack of sunlight, make for ideal conditions—decreasing the rate of chemical processes such as rusting."
Quartz notes that this makes Point Nemo uniquely positioned to serve as a spacecraft cemetery, a possible "treasure trove for archaeologists in the distant future, like how sunken sailing ships from prior centuries are valued today." As for the International Space Station, which was launched in 1998, it will soon find its way there once its "operational life" comes to a close in a few years, per US News & World Report. That outlet offers more on the deborbiting process, the other options for ISS that were rejected, and why it's getting put out of its misery in the first place. (More International Space Station stories.)
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