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.
Plot twist: deorbit vehicle will be cybertruck
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
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.
Once ISS deorbits, China will have the only space station around.
There is already planning to have a replacement in place by then.
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.
So what you’re saying is that the US can build bridges?
If you think that taking a decade to build a bridge illustrates US capacity to build bridges effectively, then sure.
They’re gonna fuck it up and crash it into Lima, I’m calling it
Perfect metaphor for the US space program as a whole
Not from the Onion. Also that seems a little low for a space mission.
Because it isn’t a Boeing contract
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…
It’s big enough that not all of it will burn up. And you don’t want the debris to hit someone.
Gotcha, makes sense.
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.
There will be shit falling down due to it’s size, so the deorbit has to be controlled
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Ngl, $843M seems kinda low for something like this
That’s like 1-2 urban highway interchanges
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.
