What a fun project to work on. A truly unique engineering challenge with no history to draw from.
Looks like a $843 million contract to deorbit it sometime in 2030, and the deorbit vehicle is going to burn up as well. They could maybe just send up a starship without any tiles/flaps at that point? Hopefully some of these commercial LEO stations really get going before then to replace it…
It would need suitable engines for the deorbit burn. I’m not sure that the RCS thrusters would be powerful enough. The raptors are too powerful, even one at minimum throttle would probably rip the ISS apart.
According to a different article I was just reading, sounds like the 2030 isn’t a hard date and it may be extended if commercial stations aren’t ready to go:
While the 2030 end date has been referenced in NASA budgetary materials in recent years, some NASA officials have stated that the station could potentially remain operational past that date. “There’s nothing magical that happens in 2030,” Steve Stich, manager of NASA"s commercial crew program at Johnson Space Center (JSC) in Houston, said during a Jan. 25, 2024 briefing.
Stich added that the ISS will continue operations until commercial space stations are in orbit and ready for crews. “We want [the commercial stations] to be supportive, and then when they’re ready to go, that’s when ISS will move out of the way,” Stich said.
Source: https://www.space.com/nasa-spacex-international-space-station-deorbit-vehicle
Part of why the commercial stations won’t be ready is because the ISS won’t commit to a deorbit date, so they can’t predict the market!
2030 should be the absolute latest, or the leaks on the Russian side will take the whole thing down.
Or the mythical Dragon XL?
Would be cool if they instead pushed it up into a cemetery orbit and in the future turned it into a museum.
It’s way closer to burning up (like, it’ll do it soon and uncontrollably without intervention) than a typical graveyard orbit. And if (when) it started breaking up in a poorly-chosen museum orbit, things would get very messy very fast.
I say send up a lil robot buddy that can hover around and 3D scan the interior for a few months and let anyone with a VR headset go hang out when they want to answer emails or whatever.
I love the 3D scanning idea. That would be a dream come true to have a virtual tour of the ISS
One of those places I’ve always wanted to see and hoped to never visit
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters JSC Johnson Space Center, Houston LEO Low Earth Orbit (180-2000km) ~ Law Enforcement Officer (most often mentioned during transport operations) RCS Reaction Control System
3 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 20 acronyms.
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Why can’t they blow it to bits instead?
The ISS is too low to cause Kessler syndrome.
They want to control the descent and not risk a bunch of huge chunks crashing through people’s houses. Or worse.
