Bigjoemonger t1_jda60pt wrote on March 22, 2023 at 10:48 PM

Reply to comment by Riptide360 in Industry sees missed opportunity in deorbiting ISS by ye_olde_astronaut

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.

Riptide360 t1_jdb1z8r wrote on March 23, 2023 at 2:39 AM

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

Bigjoemonger t1_jdb5ev8 wrote on March 23, 2023 at 3:07 AM

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.

Riptide360 t1_jdbshae wrote on March 23, 2023 at 7:23 AM

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.