Can’t they just shoot it out into space? Was a waste of time and money anyway—should have been stomping around on Mars by now.
Instead, we threw trillions of dollars for the 'war on poverty' (based on our debt, I think poverty won).
It would be insanely expensive to rocket-up the thing and give it enough velocity to kick it out into “space”, and even then it’s going to come back at some time. It’s cheap as hell to fire simple rockets to reduce the orbital velocity and bring it down.
Nothing wrong with the Russian plan, considering the ISS will be obsolete by 2020 (barring other changes). Skylab and Mir were both-deorbited successfully.
Google "Escape Velocity."
That was the original plan.
The Shuttle would haul the parts needed, for a Mars exploration vehicle, up to the ISS, where the Mars vehicle would be assembled. The thinking was that a vehicle large enough to house astronauts for many months would be too large and heavy to boost into orbit as one piece. The staff needed to assemble the Mars vehicle would live in the ISS.
Then, after the astronauts returned from Mars, many months later, they would live in isolation on the ISS until it was determined that they were not contaminated.
If you like science fiction, watch some of the movies where humans are departing Earth for deep space travel. They depart Earth from an orbiting space facility. That's what the ISS was supposed to be.
The Shuttle and ISS were never used as originally planned. The original plans were trashed during the Carter Administration. If you got a bitch about what the Shuttle and ISS didn't do, take it up with him.