Summary:
I think a meteorite caused all of the problems, because everything else
doesn't make sense. The aliens are too far-fetched, and, due to several
laws of motion, the space debris wouldn't have enough energy to cause that
kind of problem.
Paragraph:
I think that a meteor or meteorite caused the problem at the International Space Station. I believe this because none of the other reasons make sense. The floating space debris is generally very small, so it would have to be travelling at a great velocity to cause this kind of problem. True, they are travelling at very high speeds, but so is the space station and debris and space station are all travelling in the same direction. Space shuttles always launch in that direction to gain energy from the Earth’s rotation, and there is no reason to waste precious fuel to change the direction of an orbit of an object. Anything large would have done more damage, most likely totaling the station in the process. As to aliens, why would they cripple a space station and leave? Wouldn’t they at least destroy the space station completely and possibly come down to wreak havoc on the ground below? And if the damage was an accident (say, a damaged spaceship crashed into the space station), wouldn’t the collision have knocked the space ship out of orbit and into the atmosphere? Such an event would surely be noticed by anyone observing the sky on the day of the collision. And anyway, any intelligent life that lived beyond Mars would require either far more sophisticated engines (implying that they would have been trying to destroy the station, so why would they just cripple it?), or they would not be able to come at all. Besides, we would have noticed the ship long before it arrived due to all of the sophisticated technology in use today. And we are relatively certain that no intelligent life resides on Mars. As to the meteor theory, large meteors certainly have enough mass to destroy the space station easily, but a small, fast-moving meteorite could easily rip through the outer wall of the space station, taking with it whatever systems were in the way, in this case the oxygen piping system. A small, slow-moving meteor could probably do the same thing, but it would probably take out several major solar arrays as well. In conclusion, the only reasonable option is a meteorite.
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