Do You Deorbit Old Satellites/Stations?

[NASAFanboy]

[NOTE: I'm not talking about debris. I'm talking about still-functional satellites/stations with an capable powersource that have outlived their purpose. Not spent rocket stages.]

I have a question for the KSP community.

Do you deorbit your old satellites and spacestations that have an indefinite orbit that will last forever?

Do you send up ships to deorbit them?

Do you attach parachutes and send them back to Kerbin?

Do you build an muesuem around them?

Or do you just ignore them and leave them there as landmarks of Kerbal accomplishment?

I personally prefer to leave them there. I have this odd sentimental attachment to anything that makes it to orbit, and mount all my spacecraft with an power source (RTG's or solar panels - yes, even my first satellite has solar panels). Which is probably why an empty, but still functional station of an primitive design hurled past the DawnBreaker II as it was getting ready for the burn to escape velocity around Kerbin.

[regex]

I remove old, stale craft as needed because all that crap eventually chokes my laptop. Same reason I don't have persistent debris enabled.

[Zaryulenko]

I decided to put down (Not destroying it) one of my best mapping grunts, Now its sit there on the Minmus frozen lake since year 2 (Actual year in the save is 5) and when my Ike grunt completes its mission im gonna sit it aside from the other and start a museum.

Aaaand im starting to take a decision to de-orbit my first station on the save, it has been orbiting for 4 years and its starting to get useless.

[Nano606]

Pretty much every game i end up deorbiting a few stations due to some glaring flaw that i feel i cant live with. Sometimes i removed the kerbals but most of the time i dont. My stations tend to be on the large size so they can contain anything from 10-50 kerbals and removing them one by one is just a painful experience so i simply do a slow burn to deorbit and take a bunch of screenshots as the station gets torn to bits by the atmosphere.

[RocketPilot573]

I never deorbit satellites because I never put any up... For me, there are two kinds of space stations: A "Skylab" type single part station that's put up early in the save, and a full blown modular station. The single parts stations are typically deorbited very quickly (like Skylab), since they aren't very useful to me. As for the modular stations, I tend to keep them around for a very, verrrry long time. So long that I stop using the save file before they're thrown out. I only deorbit those things when they somehow become obsolete. The only time I have ever done that was with my .19 refueling station. I hated it, it was one of the most ugly crafts I have ever seen and it was ridiculously wobbly (because of the standard docking ports). So when .20 added those awesome Sr. Clamp-o-trons I did not hesitate to kill that station.

[nhnifong]

I try to construct my launch stages so that they have just enough fuel to put something on a nearly orbital trajectory, and then the payload's own thruster can finish it off.

[problemecium]

Not only do I deorbit old stuff, I try to dock it to (or already have attached) a bunch of parachutes so I can recover as much of it as I can. It often explodes anyway, but at least I get some of the parts back.

[OmegaCenti]

Yes, because loading a persistence file that is 24,000 lines long takes quite a bit longer relatively.

[Geschosskopf]

Yes, because loading a persistence file that is 24,000 lines long takes quite a bit longer relatively.

And because it's just fun to destroy stuff. When I start getting too much stuff in space, have a Great Purge and smash things in the most spectacular ways I can imagine .

[Madrias]

The only time I deorbit old satellites or stations is when a collision sends the debris screaming into Kerbin or other planetary bodies.

[Rdivine]

I normally fly a large probe container up into space, rendezvous with all the space junk and small probes, then deorbit the "trash bag".

[Mitchz95]

I explode them.

[KNSA Scientist]

I keep my debris in space, as a sort of science experiment. Of course science when there is only a 0.1% chance of it working is boring.

[Superfluous J]

I answered "yes" but that's technically not true. I recycle them via Extraplanetary Launchpads recyclers.

[LongHairedHuman]

I do not de-orbit them intentionally. It adds some tension when doing manoeuvres at certain altitudes (which can lead to spontaneous unplanned re-entry). When low on fuel, it also helps to have many options to refuel at.

[AlamoVampire]

i did vote NO, but, that has a caveat on it. It honestly depends on what I am feeling. I have a pair of satellites still going about their business <they never had a purpose to begin with, seeing as they are in sandbox mode lol> that are in orbit around the sun. one is closer in and one that has a similar orbit to Kerbin. I may deorbit some of my stuff or "enable self destruct" on others if things get crowded, but, generally, not normally no.

[Jacob01]

I de-orbit stations, but not satellites. But only if I'm bored of them and/or they get unstable. I just think they are too big to be sat up there abandoned. Anyway, its always fun to see the fireworks of a massive thing on re-entry.

[timsfitz]

I almost never build stations or satellites. There doesnt seem to be any point to them.

[merendel]

I tend to deorbit mapsats if I dont feel like retrieving them with Extraplanitary launchpads. Unless I have a really good reason to refuel and send them off to another location vs just sending a new one theres not much point in keeping them around once they are done. Stations I tend to leave as I tend to not build so many that they cause too much orbital clutter.

[Spyritdragon]

I tend to leave them up in a Lev Andropov 'Staying on-board for really long for when passing ships need some fuel' kind of situation.

[Sargent890]

I'm kinda sentimental about my satellites and stations. I have a really bad station with only two modules and about Tier 2 level tech tree parts, but I leave it up there. It's been up for over a decade IIRC. I'm also a bit too busy to build a replacement station.

[NecroBones]

Usually I just de-orbit things when I'm done with them. It's just too much of a pain to try to "rescue" them with parachutes and the like, if it wasn't designed for return.

As an example, I decided to change out the science section on my Mun space station (replacing it with one that had more docking ports, and no cupola). I built an orbital stage with a "cage" to grab the old one, complete with parachutes, which also brought up the new section. Below is an image of docking the decommissioned science section into it, and another with it parachuting down. That entire mission took WAY too long to complete, and required a lot of docking precision (done by hand, didn't have MechJeb or any other autopilots at the time). I don't do it anymore.

Edited March 18, 2014 by NecroBones

[Othuyeg]

I build space planes with rockets and shoot them into bits.

[NASAFanboy]

I build space planes with rockets and shoot them into bits.

That's quite the Kessler Syndrome.

[Cydonian Monk]

No.

Ok, yes. Sometimes. Especially if it's using a mod part that I'm about to stop using (and haven't tweaked to be ejectable, such as the space telescopes I recently decommissioned), or if it's in a "dangerous" orbital band (one that intersects the station orbits at 130km). Generally, no. Half the noise tracks in the above photo are RemoteTech satellites, which usually I keep listed as debris but recently reactivated. Some of the rest are old (and new) ScanSat satellites, but most of them are just stock craft. Basically everything that I've launched since I started in 0.19 Demo 0.18.3 and haven't deorbited.

Yes, all of those visible have working power systems, and most of them have fuel. (Except maybe the lonely one in the top center - that's either Nomad or Wayward 1, and one of the two doesn't have an RTG and is long dead. Not sure which that is....)