Is Apollo 11’s lunar module still in orbit around the moon? [video]

As neat as the various intact de-orbit scenarios for the ISS are, the majority fail to take into account its design as a zero G structure. The totality of the ISS was never designed for gravity loading, or major loads at all really.

The only way to get it back down to Earth (or even somewhere on the moon) would be in pieces. Disassemble the non essential modules of the station using the arm and ferry them off with Starship flights and then once it’s small enough start folding back up the solar arrays (they were all designed to retract), break down the truss segments, bring them back, bring the arrays back, then finally the core modules, pretty much the reverse of how they assembled it in the first place. Though the political logistics would be a nightmare as technically each country owns their modules and would have to agree to all this in the first place.

The fate of smaller space heritage items however looks less dire, as the starship could in theory be setup to retrieve Hubble, the Apollo 11 ascent stage, and a number of other interesting historical space objects that have yet to de-orbit. It just becomes a matter of money.

Personally I’ve always thought it would be neat to build a high delta-v largeish cubesat size mission to retrieve Telstar 1 would be a neat salvage demonstration since the satellite is small enough to be brought inside the ISS airlock meaning you could in theory bring it back to earth aboard a pressurised Dragon cargo flight. The obvious buyer being Intesat, until their bankruptcy last year that is.

> Every time something hits the ISS there will be some high-speed fragment coming off on a weird trajectory.

Is this true? My KSP intuition tells me that a single impulse occurring in LEO always results in a an object that passes into LEO and thus will deorbit relatively quickly.