And once we finally figure out commercial space travel, it would make for a great “ float through” museum exhibit-in space.- International Space Station: Live updates It would be like turning the ISS into a time capsule. Personally, I sort of like the last option. And you wouldn’t want it to become high-flying space junk that could endanger other crafts. Of course, it would take more energy to get there to provide that push-so you would need a bigger rocket. We could push it to a higher orbit where there's essentially no air drag and it could stay there unbothered. So if we’re not happy with the other two options-leaving it in LEO and reboosting it from time to time, or allowing it to re-enter and crash into the ocean-there’s only one possibility left. Using a heat shield and the Earth's atmosphere to slow down is free-and no one wants to turn down free.īut if it's not possible to stop the ISS before bringing it down through the atmosphere, there's really no hope of getting it back to Earth in one piece. OK, maybe you can see why spacecraft don't use rockets to de-orbit. The remaining debris might make it to a museum exhibit, but not one you could walk through. So at the very least, parts of it would burn up on reentry.
Some spacecraft, like the Space Shuttle or the SpaceX Crew Dragon, have a heat shield, material that insulates the rest of the craft from all that hot air. The same thing happens as an object moves quickly through the atmosphere: The compressed air in front of it heats up, and the object itself gets hot. You might have noticed while pumping up a bike tire that the tire gets hot as you pump more air in it’s because it’s compressing the air already in the tube.
Pressing more air into the same space causes a compression. This is a problem-because there is already air there. Some of this air gets pushed to the side, but much of it is pushed forward. Orbital objects are going really fast, and when they start to move through the atmosphere, they push the air in front of them, because that air gets in their way. As an example, pieces of Skylab made it through the atmosphere upon reentry in 1979 and hit the Earth as debris.īut anything that falls through the atmosphere gets super hot. Although reentry can be a violent event and completely destroy many objects, it’s quite possible that something the size of the ISS would at least partially survive.
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