NASA plans to deorbit the ISS sometime around 2030. Building something the size of the ISS in orbit is a huge undertaking and NASA keeps talking about wanting to build new space stations or a moon base, so why not leave the ISS in space and reuse it rather than literally throw the whole thing away?
In: Planetary Science
Imagine you buy a very nice, **very** expensive car. You drive it for over 30 years. It still works, but it’s starting to show it’s age. It needs repairs more and more often, and eventually, you’re gonna need to replace it with a new car. Is that going to be expensive as fuck? Yes. But it kinda has to be done.
You COULD just keep repairing it more and more… But is that safe? Eventually, something big is going to break, and if it happens when you’re driving on the highway, you’re gonna die, and possibly take other people down with you.
It’s much safer to take the car to take the car off the road by CHOICE, when you still have a say in when and where that happens, even if that means taking the car to a scrapyard and having to buy a new one.
That’s basically the situation with the ISS. It’s starting to show it’s age. If they just keep it in orbit, eventually, something BIG is gonna go wrong, and the station is going to catastrophically fail. This will result in giant chunks of flaming wreckage raining down on who knows where. By de-orbiting the station on purpose, they can *control* when and where it comes down, and make sure that A: it doesn’t fall on anywhere inhabited, and B: no one is on board when it falls.
Is building a new one gonna be expensive as fuck? Yes. But at some point, it kinda just *has* to be done.
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