why do we have to crash the ISS into the ocean? Can’t we send it out of Earth’s orbit safely, to crash on another planet, the sun or just keep going? Also: why can’t we do this with all the space junk that orbits the earth now?
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The space junk orbiting Earth is in a different orbit than the ISS. To avoid crashing into Earth’s atmosphere and burning up, the ISS needs to be de-orbited and sent into the ocean.
Things in orbit require a lot of extra energy to speed up and escape it to head off into space.
By contrast, you only need a little bit of energy to slow something like the ISS down enough to let gravity and atmospheric drag do the rest until it literally falls out the sky into the Pacific.
[This is how far away the ISS is from Earth to scale](https://qph.fs.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-93e3252f325c2cd46827862e536d4e6f-c). It’s much closer to Earth than most people think it is. It takes a LOT of energy to escape out of Earth’s gravity. Whereas it only takes a comparatively much smaller amount of energy to de-orbit it.
We could theoretically do the same with space junk, but docking with small scattered fragments is hard. And sending space-craft into orbit to perform the docking, and deorbit burns is expensive. And we’d need to do a lot of this to have a noticeable impact
It requires *a lot* of energy to push something out of Earth orbit. There’s a reason we’ve only been able to send a couple of tons of hardware to Mars. It’s super duper expensive. The ISS is a lot bigger than that, and would require a ridiculous amount of thrust. It’s also not made to be moved, except for small, slow burns to move it out of the way of a piece of debris, or to raise its orbit a bit. The major jolts it’d take to lift it out of orbit would likely break it apart.
Besides, why *not* crash it into the ocean? Most of it will burn up in the atmosphere, and then a few tons of metal will eventually hit the ocean? That’s really no problem.
As other people have been saying, the large issue with shooting the ISS into space is the power required.
What I don’t see being mentioned (in this scenario it’s a non-issue) is that we would want to avoid crashing our probes or crafts on planets that we are looking to research more in the future so that we don’t contaminate samples.
Right now do ISS have to use a bit of fuel from time to time, to not be dragged down on earth, so there has to be a bit of fuel on the station. If you wanted to push the statin away from earth and let’s say to the moon, would you need a moon racket! Imagine how much trouble it would be to move a moon rocked into space, attach it to the station and then start it all, and what if ISS breaks while the rocked begins pushing.
Instead, have we seen how debris from space, meteors and such things glow and burn up, even the good old space shuttle would burn up to nothing if it was not protected. So why not just let the station burn up on the way down, everything is from the earth in the first place. 🙂
The ISS is in LEO, traveling at over 17,000 mph. The escape velocity of Planet Earth is around 25,000 mph. It would take more fuel than the ISS has to accelerate it to that speed, even if it had motors capable of that degree of acceleration.
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