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
People are missing a couple of points here.
a) It doesn’t actually need to escape Earth orbit to end up in a stable orbit that wouldn’t naturally decay for hundreds, thousands, or millions of years. We can just put it in a sort of high ‘museum’ orbit and it could remain there long enough for, theoretically, some spacefaring racoon people to find it in 30 million years.
b) It’s simply not going to collide with anything up there, especially if we push it beyond what are considered the more useful orbits, and make sure it’s at an angle to the equatorial plane.
c) It already has a reusable rocket motor that could achieve this, it would ‘only’ need the fuel (only is in quotes because it’d be a decent amount of fuel).
The reason we’re not doing it is because getting the necessary fuel up to it would cost millions (not prohibitively expensive these days, but still it’s a cost with no easily arguable benefit), and because people in general simply don’t have that same kind of sentimental urge to preserve cool things.
If it were up to me, I’d push it into orbit around the Moon and give it a new berth for reusable taxis to and from the lunar surface. Then trips to the Moon would just rendezvous with the ISS first, they’d only need to bring fuel for their chosen lunar lander. (But then again, maybe a whole new station would simply work out cheaper and better. I’m sure they’ve considered this as well.)
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