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.
NASA put out a few reports like this one – https://oig.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/IG-22-005.pdf . There is no single answer, but it comes down to the fact that the vacuum of space is not the inert stable environment that we picture it as. There is solar radiation causing exterior materials to break down, micro-meteorites causing physical damage, gravity from both the Earth and Moon tugging on the station and causing flex fractures. It’s just a long list of seeming small problems compounding on top of the the age of the hull and electronics being out of date and getting worn out.
It’s getting old. The first modules have been on orbit for almost 25 years already, and most of the station isn’t much younger than that. There’s no way to do a comprehensive renovation/update, and at some point the critical life support and safety systems will be too old to be considered reliable. Right now that’s looking like some time in the 2040s.
ELI5? It’s old and smells of farts.
We need to launch newer and bigger space stations to contain all new gaseous emissions from our younger and sexier flatulent astronauts.
My preference would be to elevate the station to GSO, should be left for future generations to show where we came from
Everything in space is being horribly irradiated by the sun and smacked with tiny bits of sand sized debris all the time. It’s very difficult to patch up the outside. It has a certain design life and beyond that it gets riskier to have humans living in it.
In addition to what everyone has said here – in the 20+ years it has been in space, there are likely many, many parts which have gone obsolete.
Not only big parts, but the amount of small electronics that you cannot buy anymore is enormous. NASA likely would have bought out final stocks of components when they shut down the lines, but there gets a point where even those run out.
Therefore, you cannot fix the modules up there, and building a replacements to fit in the same slot out of new components is often more difficult and costly than building a whole new product.
2 big reasons:
1. It costs 3 Billion a year to run and maintain the IIS… NASA’s budget is around 24B and wants to “go to the moon then mars”. These moon/mars mission are going to cost a lot and NASA needs room in the budget to do those things.
2. The IIS is starting to get old. Many of the components were built in the 90’s and there are signs that the station is hitting its end of life. There are small leaks on the station, all lot of systems are out of date and at some point the station needs to be overhauled (at great expense) in order to maintain its safety.
Space is an extremely hostile environment for materials. Micrometeorite impacts, extreme temperature cycling, erosion from residual atmosphere, UV radiation, the effects of vacuum on certain materials. All of these things lead to cumulative and incremental damage to the materials which make up our spacecraft and space stations. Over time that can lead to serious flaws developing
It literally can’t be “left in orbit.” Its orbit is low enough to be slowed down by air molecules at a gradual rate. Most ISS missions bring up fuel so that they can use their rocket engines to accelerate and refine the whole space station’s orbit.
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