Instead of deorbiting the ISS...

I was under the impression that the ISS already takes advantage of docked craft to boos the orbit once in a while. There is atmospheric drag, and it can be mitigated by orienting the solar panels to act as sails, but that's not quite enough. Boosts are occasionally needed.

The ISS is an old piece of shit
Theres nothing to be done with it other than sink it into the ocean

It's only 400 tons of material up there, that can be replaced in 1 launch by a proper launch vehicle.

Lunar orbits are very unstable because the moon does not have even gravity fields at all. Its density changes greatly as you orbit over it, which quickly degrades the orbit until it crashes or is ejected. Either way, it will be very difficult to send supplies to it once it is out that far and it would be very risky to get people back home using the Soyuz capsules like we currently do. Basically it would become unmanned because of the high risk and inability to get supplies to it for routine repairs and would either get ejected into solar orbit, crash into the moon, or possibly even crash into Earth. Overall a very bad idea

Yeah but the ISS does 50 m/s per year. And the moon is 4 km/s of delta-v from LEO. So it would take 80 years to boost the ISS from LEO to LLO using existing stationkeeping thrusters.

If we wanted to do this, we'd need a higher thrust method.

Modules and shit are designed to be useful and safe for a given time. The Russians kept Mir up way past that time, and look at the problems they had.

That's a little harsh, but not totally inaccurate.

You contradict yourself about the stability of the orbit.

I am pretty sure the ISS is not designed with the structural strength to be boosted into lunar orbit. That's a pretty significant delta vee there...

>that effort can stand for years to come

Guys who know more about it than you or I do not believe this to be true.

>has seven years to live.

At one point there was talk of selling it to some industry with interests in space, or some nation(s) with interest in getting into space, to use it for those last few years. What became of that notion, I wonder?

Japmoot should by the damn thing.

Hopefully NASA is going to either build a "permanent" station, or get back to actually sending explorers into the solar system.

ISS has done all that it was intended to do, really. It is expensive to run, those funds might be put to better use now.

when I say existing stationkeeping thrusters, I'm including soyuz, atv, and existing attitude control thrusters

fwiw, soyuz doesn't work to a much higher altitude than the current one for esoteric reasons that only deranged russian engineers understand

>ISS can be replaced in 1 launch by a proper launch vehicle

nah m8, delta IV heavy only does 28 metric tons to LEO and it is the heaviest currently operational vehicle, so ISS is like 15 launches worth of mass

still, maybe future super heavy vehicles can do better. STS could do 122 tons and Saturn V did 140

>soyuz doesn't work to a much higher altitude than the current one

What? I am pretty sure rockets work anywhere.

idk why but soyuz has a maximum altitude rating. part of the reason the ISS is at the orbit it is at is because that is the maximum altitude that the soyuz is rated to do stationkeeping maneuvers

one of the claimed benefits of the atv is that it can boost from a higher altitude and thus they can put the iss in a higher orbit