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
That’s the weird thing about space. No matter how much you “kick” something into space, it will *always* return, unless you manage to hit something else with it.
So it’s a lot easier to give it a slight bump and hit Earth than give it a massive WELL AIMED push to try and hit something else.
Also, the ISS isn’t really made to be pushed around with a lot of force. So chances are high that something would break off. Those pieces might then collide with important satellites or crash into a house on Earth. With a bump towards Earth it will definitely break apart but everything will still go pretty much to the same spot (which you can choose)
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