So I’ve just heard they’ve set a year of 2032 to decommission the International Space Station. Since if they just left it, its orbit would eventually decay and it would crash. Rather than have a million tons of metal crash somewhere random, they’ll control the reentry and crash it into the spacecraft graveyard in the pacific.
But why not push it out of orbit into space? Given that they’ll not be able to retrieve the station in the pacific for research, why not send it out into space where you don’t need to do calculations to get it to the right place.
In: Planetary Science
Think of the ISS like a car that’s just a little way up a hill. The car is almost out of gas, janky, beat up, barely drivable. You could haul enough gas up to take it to the top of the hill (maybe, it’s a real POS), or you could use the tiny bit of gas left to position it, put it in neutral, and let it roll perfectly into a pit in a junkyard at the bottom of the hill. Which one would you do?
Latest Answers