There is a point in the South Pacific where, if you were floating on the surface, the closest human beings to you would often be the astronauts on the International Space Station passing overhead. Not people on any shore. People in orbit, about 400 kilometres straight up. That is how far this place sits from dry land.
It is called Point Nemo, after the submarine captain in Jules Verne, and it is the most remote spot in any ocean. The nearest land in any direction is more than 2,400 kilometres away, over 1,500 miles: a tiny uninhabited island out near the Pitcairn group, one of the islets off Easter Island, and a lonely piece of Antarctica. In every direction there is only open water.
The place was not found by a sailor. In 1992 a survey engineer named Hrvoje Lukatela calculated it, using software he wrote to find the single ocean point that maximised the distance to the three nearest coastlines. Nobody needed to visit. The answer was a set of coordinates in an empty stretch of sea, about 48 degrees south and 123 degrees west.
That emptiness turned out to be useful. Because almost nothing lives near the surface here, and no shipping lane or fishing fleet passes through, space agencies use the water around Point Nemo as a target. Since the early 1970s they have deliberately steered dead satellites and spent spacecraft down through the atmosphere to fall into this zone, so that any surviving debris lands as far from people as physically possible. Hundreds of craft now rest on the seabed here, among them Russia’s 120-tonne Mir station, brought down in 2001.
The International Space Station is booked for the same fate. When it is finally retired around 2030, engineers plan to guide it down over Point Nemo, the quietest corner of the planet, watched at the last moment by whoever happens to be its closest neighbours: the next crew in orbit, looking down.
