>>14384118If there is no station keeping then things in Low Earth Orbit (LEO) inevitably lose altitude over the years until they re-enter the atmosphere. This isn't a problem with small satellites like Starlink which get vapourized in the upper atmosphere but things built of sturdier stuff (such as nuclear reactors e.g. Kosmos 954) or large objects like the ISS are capable of having bits of them make it to the ground, some of these bits being quite sizeable and hazardous to whoever or whatever they hit.
When you look at how much of the Earth's surface is land, and then how much of it is inhabited by people, you realise the chance of being struck by space debris is extremely low. That said, it is still considered something of a diplomatic faux pas to abandon things so that they experience uncontrolled re-entry, as happened with Skylab (the Shire of Esperance in Western Australia, where much of Skylab landed, fined NASA $400 for littering) or more recently with the first bug station, Tiangong-1, which by sheer luck ended up coming down near the satellite graveyard in the Pacific, Point Nemo.
As for the ISS, there's no real point to keeping it once its useful life has ended. Space budgets are small and no one wants to be spending precious $$$ and launches on station keeping for an abandoned station. Its end of life is literally end of its life as maintenance requirements spiral out of control. Someone mentioned in a thread the other day that astronauts spend 80% of their time doing maintenance tasks instead of actual science, and this will only get worse over the coming years.
Maybe, just maybe, it could be disassembled and brought down by Starship.
