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
It would take a *lot* of energy to make ISS escape Earth. Like, an amount comparable to the energy to orbit the thing in the first place, which was dozens of rocket launches. Making it re-enter in a controlled manner takes almost nothing, just the decision to do so. It is so low (skimming the upper atmosphere all the time) that just doing nothing to it for about 6-8 months would make it re-enter and burn up.
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