https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/spacex-wins-nasa-contract-to-destroy-the-international-space-station/
The world will be watching—literally—as SpaceX tackles possibly what might be its highest-stakes endeavor to date: safely destroying the beloved International Space Station
If a chunk of ISS falls and damages something or hurts a person, who is liable: the organization that put it up there or the one paid to take it down?
Per the contract once spacex builds and docks the deorbit vehicle to the ISS they are hand over ownership of it to NASA. So NASA would be responsible.
The ISS is aging, and for safety’s sake, NASA intends to incinerate the immense facility around 2031. To accomplish the job, the agency will pay SpaceX up to $843 million, according to a statement released on June 26.
See you guys in 2040
Burgerland can't even build a bridge, you think it's capable of building a whole space station? 😂
Huh? We are constantly building bridges, what a weird claim. But of course the US is quite capable of launching another space station.
SpaceX has won the right to tackle a monumental task: destroying the International Space Station (ISS). The demolition will shove the iconic and enormous station down through Earth’s atmosphere in a fiery display. And if anything goes wrong, a cascade of debris could rain down on our planet’s surface.
Conceived and built in a post-cold-war partnership with Russia, the ISS, like so many of NASA’s major projects, has lasted far longer than its initial design life of 15 years. Nothing lasts forever, however, especially in the harsh environment of outer space. The ISS is aging, and for safety’s sake, NASA intends to incinerate the immense facility around 2031. To accomplish the job, the agency will pay SpaceX up to $843 million, according to a statement released on June 26. The contract covers the development of a unique deorbit vehicle to usher the unwieldy ISS to its doom yet excludes launch costs.
Isn’t it in a low enough orbit that it should just come down and burn up eventually anyway? Seems like they could save a lot of money that way…
To add to what others have said already, much smaller batteries, though think like lantern sized, didn't burn up on re-entry and damaged someone's house. NASA is already paying for that.
It's big enough that not all of it will burn up. And you don't want the debris to hit someone.
Just give it to some KSP players lol.
They'll figure out a cheap way to either send it on a near vertical entry path into the ocean, or a 150 year multi planet gravity sling into the sun.