Probably cheaper to bring it down to Earth. Gravity is already doing most of the work.
I could be wrong but I think the earth still has a gravitational pull way further up than the space station is located.
So if they could generate enough energy to move it further away, It could end up coming back eventually. Our great great great grandchildren will deal with it lol.
The ISS is in LEO, which is technically still in our atmosphere. It’s beyond the Karman line so officially in space, but our atmosphere extends beyond that by quite a ways so it still experiences atmospheric drag, which slows it down over time and continues to decay its orbit. Technically in a 3-body problem Earth is exerting gravity to every known body and vice versa, and moving something far enough out of Earth’s gravity well for it to experience very little of our gravity is not an option.
Accelerating this huge station to move it well enough away from Earth is far more expensive than slowing it down a little to quickly deorbit it to a safe location on Earth. Most of it will burn up before reaching the surface of Earth, but some pieces will remain that could crash down onto someone so a safe deorbit is necessary. There’s also nuclear components on the ISS, which by protocol must be “disposed” of properly, which includes crashing it into Point Nemo. There’s a fair amount of nuclear material below the sea there.
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u/ejr204 7d ago
Why not just push it out into space, sounds a lot easier