The International Space Station is due for decommission in the 2030s. NASA is currently evaluating how to go about retiring the station: options include letting it burn up in the atmosphere or pushing it into a graveyard orbit. There’s another option that doesn’t involve disposing of the ISS at all, which would extend the life of the station by leveraging its considerable size and mass for future space missions. The ISS could be the ideal anchor for a skyhook that would act like a slingshot to propel people and cargo into space cheaply, as Aeon reports.

The concept is so bafflingly simple that it’s a mystery why agencies around the globe are not all-in on the idea. Go read this essay over at Aeon, which goes into detail to describe the skyhook (or skyhooks) to see what it’s all about. The gist of it is that space junk, or debris that has accumulated over decades of space exploration, could be used as counterweights attached to tethers that catch spacecraft in the Earth’s atmosphere, then release them into space.

That’s where the ISS and other large “dead” satellites, such as Envisat — a 26-meter long, 10-meter wide former communications satellite — come in.These could provide a major component of the skyhooks. The ISS, too, since it’s the largest object humanity has launched into space. Per Aeon:

Not only is the idea clever but it would save money and other resources, as well as enable the construction of space infrastructure, according to Kurzgesagt. The way video illustrates the concept makes it seem viable. In fact, the concept makes you consider just how wasteful space exploration is at the moment, currently relying on massive amounts of our finite resources to launch relatively small payloads.

Skyhook(s) could provide a compelling alternative so long as we’re open to the paradigm shift of reusing resources rather than literally burning them up — be it in a booster rocket or in a fiery descent to Earth. But it may be worth it for a system that allow us to reuse the detritus orbiting the Earth.