You gotta wonder if today's fight with the previous commander of the ISS had anything to do with it.
It would be the most petty, dumb, and childish thing to call for the de-obiting of the ISS over a tweet, but my expectations for him get lower each day.
Tell me they're gonna use it as a staging point for the new station parts and build it remotely from here instead of launching everything up there from fresh after abandoning their foothold
Reaching escape velocity is expensive. We can be more efficient and still achieve the same result using a minuscule fraction of the propellant and none of the rocket framing.
The book A City On Mars is a great read about why everything Mars settlement enthusiasts want to do is a bad idea, and yes it covers the problem of a private company controlling your air supply.
Simpsons did it first! In an episode the rich and smart were sent on a ship as the earth is ending. Thought the smart folks will just be replaced by AI at this point. Once it becomes a reliable repository for knowledge - meaning no 'need' for fart smellas smart fellas.
The conclusion of such an approach is even broached by Wall-E, disney of all folks.
I dunno, what if in a couple million years some alien civilization finds what's left of him and resurrects or clones his brain? I don't know if we should take that risk..
The Apartheid Manchild has this weird obsession with Mars.
There will be no permanent settlement on Mars in the next decade. (I frankly doubt that there will even have been human footprints on Mars in the next decade!) There will be no permanent settlement on Mars in the next century. There will likely be no permanent settlement on Mars in the next millennium. And I'm saying that last one not because I don't think we'd have the technology in a thousand years, but rather because there is no point in living on Mars.
Mars has nothing we need that's worth maintaining a settlement in the face of conditions harsher than the absolute worst the Earth has to offer. If people want to live in a permanently cold shithole with nothing usefully accessible they can just build a house on Antarctica. It's a far cheaper way to fuck around and find otu.
I think that's probably the instigating factor. He saw on Twitter that the ISS has a big crack and the government is covering it up, he decided it's true because in his mind trolls on the internet have a higher level of authority than any expert or scientist, and now he has to insist on deorbiting it to prove himself right instead of backing down or listening to any reason to the contrary.