The plan is to gradually put it into an elliptical orbit where the perigee is as low as it can go and then to do one big burn that will put it into a steep enough final descent that all of the debris will end up in more or less the same place.

Yeah, absolutely, you'd solve most of the really hard parts of this problem that way. The downside is that it would pretty difficult at a pure technical level and also that you'd have to coordinate everything around the station being taken apart vs. having everything else drive the decommissioning timeline and then the actual deorbiting basically just being a button you push.

Stuff wears out over time. Even something as simple as the shutters on the cupola windows have through hull connections that have o-rings to make them air tight.

Here is the actual posting about it if anyone is interested.

It's an interesting problem, a lot of different factors working against each other. I'm looking forward to seeing what people come up with.

Even more difficult when it comes to Mars because of the long transit times. We can predict solar activity reasonably well in the short term and the Apollo missions were short enough that we could have just delayed a mission if conditions on the sun looked dicey.

Don't worry, when we get to the point where we're having to fuck around with geoengineering to head off the worst effects of climate change we may well get a nuclear war on top of climate change.

Climate change is a particularly difficult topic to whatabout because it's gonna make all these other problems worse.

If your support was contingent on you never being slightly inconvenienced then your support is pretty much worthless.

One of my earliest memories is of 7 red roses for the 7 astronauts on the altar in my preschool's chapel.

Yeah but that means that modest mass savings on the upper stage translates into a massive savings on the lower stages.

If I had to choose between a cop or a random gay guy with a gun to protect me from a right wing terrorist I'd choose the gay guy.