Moving the structure to higher orbit and making it a tourist space museum spot would be a better use.

>For some in industry, though, spending as much as $1 billion to bring down the station sends the wrong message and is also a missed opportunity to instead repurpose elements of the station, recycling material that could be used for other commercial applications.

exposed to temperature extremes, radiation and pressure for decades.

how do you assess fatigue?

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"Small companies that do not have the financial backing to scale up see missed opportunity for US taxpayers to subsidize their studies and development"

It would if there wasn't the risk of a dead satellite crashing into the ISS and turning it into a massive cloud of space trash.

Low earth orbit is where all the action is at. Boosting to a higher orbit means physically more space and increased time to react.

With some clever tweets they could probably sell it to Elon Musk for more money than it's worth

Wrong. To be a museum it still needs to be maintained. Needs the ability to maneuver, to be kept pressurized. Still ability to actively deorbit needs to be maintained. All very, very expensive.

When folks live in space they’ll want cheap places to go. Having a piece of living history is something of a rarity up there! At least the moon has a flag & moon buggy.

> cheap

Maintaining the ISS is not cheap.

Nope. Space travel is like funding trips to the new world. One day Musk’s Tesla Starman in space will be as famous as Plymouth rock. https://spacein3d.com/where-is-starman-live-tracker/

"Nope" what? Do you honestly think that maintaining the ISS is cheap? Did you get confused and reply to the wrong comment, or do you simply have no idea what you are talking about?

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Save the hate. I just thought we could have a discussion about saving some space history by moving the station into higher orbit. No shortage of debris in space so I'm glad they are at least being responsible about the millions it will cost to deorbit ISS.

> The oldest segments are from 1998

You wish. That's just the launch date. Zvezda dates back to late 1980s and Zarya to early 1990s, because they were considered as modules for Mir and later Mir-2 project, to finally get included in the ISS.

Tell him it’s woke and he will bring it down with nothing but a tweet and boy, what a witty and well thought out tweet it’ll be….

It also means much more costly resupply missions.

Is gateway actually being built?

It would be better to deorbit it while it's still in relatively decent condition, then wait for something to go wrong and potentially have an uncontrolled re-entry and landing on some city.

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It seems like you are not particularly interested in a discussion that involves dealing with reality.

Maintaining ISS runs about $3 billion a year. Getting that much gear up there cost $150 billion. The tug boat NASA is building for $80 million could just as easily push up as it does down. NASA wants chunks of it brought down like we did with SkyLab, albeit a little bit more controlled this time, but a hell of a lot larger.

Remember how many decades it took us to build a replacement for Skylab?

Remember how many decades it took us to build a replacement for the Space Shuttle?

The discussion on saving the ISS as a resource is useful. Lets hope most of it can be saved or it'll be decades more.

Feel free to stop participating if you don't have anything meaningful to add.

Does that translate to the US picking up the tab to deorbit the Russian modules? Any idea of how many modules are being saved?

Why would any be saved? They can't be reused for anything. Any thoughts of saving anything is a child's fantasy. It has no grounding in reality.

Where is this millions of dollars of cost to deorbit coming from that you keep talking about?

Detach the module. Fire thrusters to slow the module down. It falls to earth. That's how deorbiting works.

>The tug boat NASA is building for $80 million could just as easily push up as it does down.

"Just as easily." It's much easier to deorbit something. Just decelerate it enough so that it's orbit intersects with the atmosphere. You can't just "push up" and expect the ISS to maintain a nice, circular orbit around the Earth.

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

|Fewer Letters|More Letters| |-------|---------|---| |CSA|Canadian Space Agency| |ESA|European Space Agency| |ESM|European Service Module, component of the Orion capsule| |JAXA|Japan Aerospace eXploration Agency| |SLS|Space Launch System heavy-lift|

^(5 acronyms in this thread; )^(the most compressed thread commented on today)^( has 26 acronyms.)
^([Thread #8716 for this sub, first seen 23rd Mar 2023, 04:08]) ^[FAQ] ^([Full list]) ^[Contact] ^([Source code])

Is the ISS even designed to do that? How much would it cost just to get it into a different orbit and will the ISS even last long enough for there to be any benefit?

Reread the article. Only some of the modules (most likely Russian) are being de-orbited. The rest of ISS will be rebranded. My hope was that they could just move the abandoned modules into a higher graveyard orbit like we do with other items to big to safely re-enter, but NASA nixed the idea.

Too much, its thrusters arent designed for that, just to avoid collissions with other satellites, you'd need to essentially strap a rocket onto it.

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