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 go downwards you need some fuel until the drag of the atmosphere takes over.
To push it upwards you’d need A LOT of fuel since you never get any assistance. It’s also a massive structure that was assembled in multiple rocket launches, so by its very nature it will be expensive to move with rockets alone.
A common misconception is that you can just drive towards a certain direction in space since there’s no friction. In reality, the way of going to a higher orbit is accelerating sideways and in this case, a safe orbit would be pretty high and therefore very expensive.
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