No mention of if they plan on upgrading the station since parts of it will be over 30 years old at that point. Sergey Volkov was the youngest person to travel to the ISS when he was 35. I'm certain at some point NASA or another agency will send up an astronaut the same as the ISS, if not younger, some point after the station crosses the 30 year mark.
That's fun. The ham radio comment is probably wrong, since there's no reason for the transceiver or repeater that's up there to be left behind, or connected to the computer.
Computers Can Be Hacked Using High-Frequency Sound I don't know how much gear can be removed from the ISS, or how much NASA plans on removing from it before dumping it, but it's not out of the question that they could hack it.
It's a fun idea to explore, but in reality there are a thousand practical reasons it would be a terrible idea.
Come on, what could be more Bond-villainy than for Bezos or Musk to steal the ISS? Bezos is already getting the Dutch to dismantle a bridge so he can sail his new yacht. A yacht so big, I need to add, that it has its own support yacht with a helipad.
An how can ye just give up on Scotty's final resting place like that, lad? You know that he'd fin' a way to save tha ship no matter what!
As far as I know, they just have brand-name, store-bought ham radios up there. But yeah, saving a $250 radio from a $ihavenoideabutmustbealot space station you're going junk probably doesn't make sense when you would have mass/volume limits on the final trips down.
That's assuming the Soviets don't invade Ukraine, forcing the American crew to segregate in the station's Discovery module while the Russians hunker down in the Leonov module.
It's an incredible piece of human history. Does anyone know -- is it physically impossible to bring it down in a way that would preserve it, given our current tech, or just wildly expensive?
There's simply no way to do it. It's nearly 400 feet across and weighs around 1 million pounds. Even if you could disassemble it back into its component modules, we don't have anything that could safely bring them back to Earth. I doubt if they'd have let the shuttle bring one back if something had gone wrong during one of the construction flights. At best, they would have parked the module in what they hoped was a safe orbit until they could get another shuttle up there to finish the job. At worst, they'd have made sure that it burned up over the ocean.
