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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[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
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