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
so orbit is basically moving so fast horizontally that even though you’re falling you miss the ground (buzz lightyear was right!)
basically things in orbit “want” to hit whatever they’re orbiting (and if left alone the ISS’s orbit would EVENTUALLY decay naturally and it would crash into the earth) to get something to break orbit requires a TREMENDOUS amount of energy (think about how big a saturn V rocket is, it’s mostly rocket fuel, it took all of that to get something about the size of a van out of earth’s orbit).
so it’s way easier and cheaper to just make sure it comes down somewhere in the pacific. and it’s not going to be that hard to hit the pacific ocean, it’s sort of hard to get a sense of how big the pacific is but it’s 60 MILLION square miles (and if you miss there’s a decent chance you’ll hit the indian ocean which is 20 million square miles) basically if you closed your eyes and just hoped for the best there most likely outcome is you’d hit the pacific
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