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
I think the misconception here is that an orbit is something you can be easily pushed out of. In truth, an orbit is a state of perpetual falling while missing the ground, so no matter how you push or pull, you can just fall differently. So the proposal now is to fall in a controlled manner so that it can be calculated where and when it will hit the ground.
In order to make the ISS leave the Earth’s orbit and go venturing out into space forever, it would take immense amounts of fuel and possibly the installation of real propulsion systems in the first place. That’s much more expensive and complicated than just dropping it.
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