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
To add onto what others have written, something like this is done for satellites on the geostationary orbit, which is too far out for a quick, cheap (fuel-wise) deorbiting. What geostationary satellites do instead is to increase their orbit somewhat so that they no longer take valuable space on the geostationary orbit. This is called a graveyard orbit. It’s far out so it doesn’t matter that there are uncontrollable satellites or space debris.
But this is impractical for the ISS. The ISS is massive, and any changes of velocity require a lot of fuel. It is also quite low near Earth, so getting it far enough where it cannot bump into other satellites would require huge amounts of fuel.
Note that even graveyard orbits are still well below the velocities required for leaving Earth’s gravitational influence completely.
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