WASHINGTON - NASA awarded SpaceX $843 million to build a vehicle capable of pushing the International Space Station into Earth's atmosphere for its planned destruction around 2030, it said on Wednesday.

Under its new NASA contract, SpaceX will build what the space agency called the US Deorbit Vehicle to deorbit the space station and avoid risks to populated areas, with NASA taking ownership of the craft and handling the deorbiting operation.

The football field-sized research lab, led primarily by the United States and Russia, has been continuously staffed with government astronauts during its some 24 years of operation, but its aging components have led NASA and its foreign partners to set 2030 as a planned retirement date.

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The US, Japan, Canada and the countries under the European Space Agency have committed to the space station partnership through 2030, while Russia has agreed to remain a partner through 2028, the date through which the Russian space agency Roscosmos believes its hardware can last.

Holding the US-Russian alliance together is largely a technical interdependency in which Russian thrusters maintain the station's orbital altitude and US solar arrays keep its power running.

Those Russian thrusters were originally meant to push the ISS into Earth's atmosphere at the end of its life. But in recent years NASA has sought its own deorbit abilities.

For after 2030, NASA has been funding early development of privately built space stations in low-Earth orbit to maintain US presence in the cosmic region, with Airbus and Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin involved in those efforts.

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The US space agency is also investing billions of dollars, partnering with several countries and companies including SpaceX to return the first humans to the moon since 1972.