Leave it to humans to do everything backwards.

-Warik

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quote:

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Originally posted by Warik:
Why not just knock it out of orbit and send it into the depths of space? Station falls to Earth... X% chance of loss of life. Station flies into outer space 0.000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001% chance of loss of life.

Leave it to humans to do everything backwards.

-Warik

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uhhh - are you aware of what an "orbit" is. it is pretty hard to get something to stay in orbit, and the hard part is gravity - it really wants to fall into the largest body near it - which would be us. it would take lots of energy (probably doesn't have the fuel for the thrust - hell, it might not even have engines - it was probably placed there) to send it into a larger orbit (read - off into space).
and orbit is simply something falling back to the earth very slowly and in a roundabout way - it is efficient once you are in orbit - getting there and changing orbit is expensive (both energy and money).
so the russians are doing the smart thing by crashing it if they have no use for it anymore (it is very dangerous to leave it in a busted orbit up there - if it gets hit by space debris, taht will tear it up causing even more space debris to be up there, which makes all of our space flights that much harder - a penny isn't likely to hurt you if I threw it at you - but if I throuw it at you at a speed of 5miles a second, it is sure as hell going to fuck you up).
so bring that thing down to earth - we are 75% water anyway.

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"Fear of things invisible is the natural seed of that which every one in himself calleth religion."
--Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (1651)

quote:

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Originally posted by HappyScrappy:
uhhh - are you aware of what an "orbit" is.

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Yes I know exactly what an orbit is. Gravity, centripetal acceleration, yadayadayada etc. I'm also aware that the Earth is 75% water.

Don't mind me if I'm a little displeased about the fact that I might have to be looking up for a few hours sometime soon. I can tell you one thing about where it's going to land, though, I'm sure that not even a penny-sized chunk of debris is going to fall even REMOTELY close to Russia. =)

-Warik

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I can at least a couple of million in punative damages if I survive!!!

quote:

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Originally posted by rimmer:
Thanks, I thought that if you put something on the orbit it stays there forever. Why the object slows down in the vacuum? So even the small telecommunication satellites have engines to speed them up to stay on the orbit?

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Under perfect conditions, an object could stay in orbit forever.

If you had a perfectly spherical, never-changing planet that wasn't moving at all which was completely isolated from the rest of the universe and the object oribiting that perfectly spherical, never-changing planet was also a perfectly spherical, never-changing object, then we have an everlasting orbit.

The problem is that the Earth is not a perfect sphere which is rotating and is orbiting the Sun which is orbiting the galaxy which is orbiting the universe which is orbiting God knows what. Plus you have the gravitational force from space junk and other planets and distant stars (as insignificant as it is) screwing with everything.

As such, we can never really have a perfect orbit.

-Warik

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