NASA is fostering continued scientific, educational, and technological developments in low Earth orbit to benefit humanity, while also supporting deep space exploration at the Moon and Mars. As the agency transitions to commercially owned space destinations closer to home, it is crucial to prepare for the safe and responsible deorbit of the International Space Station in a controlled manner after the end of its operational life in 2030.
NASA announced SpaceX has been selected to develop and deliver the U.S. Deorbit Vehicle that will provide the capability to deorbit the space station and ensure avoidance of risk to populated areas.
If you've ever seen Gravity, it makes more sense as to why.
A large vehicle such as this can turn into many smaller objects very quickly, and potentially destroy other space faring vehicles, such as satellites.
Also, a service life means beyond a time period previously designated, this vehicle could undergo rapid and massive system failure, which would be more costly to fix than just simply destroy.
Pretty much, when everything is traveling at over 29,000 km/h (~18,000 mph) pretty much anything becomes a bullet. A spec of paint, a bolt, a wrench, pretty much anything is going to kill you if it hits you while on an EVA. It can actually be much worse than a bullet because even powerful rifles only launch bullets on earth at only 3,000 km/h.
Only relative velocities matter, so as long as something is traveling the same direction as you it's not too bad, most things will only be at most a few dozen km/h speed difference that came off the space station. The absolute worst case is a right angle collision where something hits something else at 90 degrees. Because now the two forces add and instead of a head on collision where only one orbital plane is affected it's now two orbital planes affected. This actually happened in 2009.
Theoretically just shooting the ISS with an anti-satellite missile would be the cheapest way to deorbit it, and while that would work well for most of the debris some of it would get pushed up to a higher orbit and not actually come down. Plus with the size of the ISS that could easily turn into millions of separate objects which would be insanely difficult to track.
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u/Busy_Yesterday9455 5d ago
Link to a short video
NASA is fostering continued scientific, educational, and technological developments in low Earth orbit to benefit humanity, while also supporting deep space exploration at the Moon and Mars. As the agency transitions to commercially owned space destinations closer to home, it is crucial to prepare for the safe and responsible deorbit of the International Space Station in a controlled manner after the end of its operational life in 2030.
NASA announced SpaceX has been selected to develop and deliver the U.S. Deorbit Vehicle that will provide the capability to deorbit the space station and ensure avoidance of risk to populated areas.