No, we can’t “just” throw our trash into the sun.
But I hate when people use current launchers to demonstrate the cost of a massive space project. That’s not how it would be done. And I wish they’d simply say “the sun is the most expensive place to get in the solar system.” Because it is.
The idea of garbage into the Sun is such a horrible idea. Waste is a great potential resource, it would be stupid to put effort into anything but lumping it together and putting it in an out of the way place.
That being said, if I wanted to dump something into the Sun, I’d use a solar sail for propulsion
From the title I thought you’d be talking socialism 😉
Socialism has never been tried! And it’ll work just fine once we’re in charge! /sarc
Anyone who doesn’t believe how hard it would be to dump garbage into the sun, try doing so in Kerbal Space Program. The delta V needed is enormous.
Did you ever notice how you can hold out a garbage bag on a sunny day and let go and it will just fall up to the sun? And even the Astronauts just dispose of garbage that way, I hear.
What’s this silliness about “delta-v’s?”
…………..
😉
And I wish they’d simply say “the sun is the most expensive place to get in the solar system.” Because it is.
You are making a perfectly good point, but in the interest of thinking about our whole solar system, it might be fun to think about whether you are wrong. For starters, how about the very center of the Earth as a more expensive destination? I think it would fun to figure out which planet’s center would be the most expensive to reach. Jupiter seems like an easy bet, but I think you could make reasonable arguments for some of the other planets, depending on which theory you believe about their cores.
Once again, you have the Sun. Try putting something at the heart of the Sun, I dare you. Not only are you dealing with 10-15 million K temperatures, density peaking at roughly eight times that of gold, ridiculous pressure both from mass and light, fusion environment (from 7 million K on up), and travel a distance of roughly 400,000 miles through progressively more difficult terrain with the most ridiculous conditions (above 7 million K) holding for about 30% of the journey.
Ha! Fair enough! I was comparing transporting things to the center of various planets to sending things on a collision with the sun, but yes, once you are making that weird comparison, why not consider transporting things to the center of the sun itself?!
So, Rand, here’s a comparison that might actually illustrate the expense of sending garbage to the sun: calculate at what depth you’d have to bury garbage on Earth to be more expensive than sending it on a collision course with the sun.
You merely need to set the controls for the heart of the sun……and careful with that axe Eugene……
An alternative I remember reading about (don’t remember if was from AC Clarke or Sagan) was the idea of inhabiting a Dyson Shell. Rather than a Dyson Sphere, which encapsulates a captive star, a Dyson Shell would be built around a black hole at a radius far enough from the hole to provide 1g at the surface of the shell. Both garbage disposal and energy generation are taken care of by the same mechanics. Dumpsters are loaded with trash and sent down through the surface to the “bottom” or towards the black hole. At the appropriate point along the dumpsters flight path, it ejects its trash into the black hole and gains enough acceleration to spin around the hole and out back towards the surface, at which point a “catcher” receives the dumpster and uses the energy acquired during capture to generate electricity. QED
OK, pass the bong please…
Won’t someone please think of the alternate dimensions being destroyed by our waste and chemicals!! Support the environmentally friendly, ‘green’ use of black holes.
2.6 trillion pounds is about 1 cubic km of stuff. Moving 1 cubic km of anything, a distance of 1 km would be expensive.
But if want to ship waste of some kind into space, it seems one should impact it on the lunar surface. So pick some 100 km diameter crater and crash stuff into it. And regardless of what stuff one impacted on the moon, at some later date, it probably could be mined. But it seems rather cheap waste, one would focus on difficult to store waste, so, such as, nuclear waste.
The economics of it, is related to the need to store something for say 1000 year or longer- so what is the price per cubic meter per century?
And this is not just abandoned, but kept secure- some entity assumes the liability for what is stored.
And a governmental nuclear waste facility already has proven to be an expensive option.
A problem with Earth is it has water table, an atmosphere, and an unstable surface- floods, earthquakes, etc.
One could also use the Moon to store stuff which is valuable rather just expensive waste. If all you doing with a gold reserve is re-labeling which countries own some portion of gold, you do the same thing on the Moon. But it perhaps more reasonable to mine the gold in space and instead of bringing to to Earth, it could stored on the Moon.
So you store something valuable on the Moon, because it’s cheaper than shipping to Earth.
Likewise it would be better to store nuclear waste from local lunar nuclear reactors.
So perhaps earth nuclear waste and earth gold will stored on the Moon after one already has lunar storage of these things due to lunar activity.
In terms of earth garbage, it should handle just like shipping other bulk material- ore, coal, etc and one needs a hole to put it in.
Something easily cheaper than shipping into space is to make holes. Make deep vertical holes which are close to a city which is the source of the garbage. It seems to me a vertical shaft rather than a open pit has number of advantage. One stacks waste in which it own weigh compresses it. Don’t have oxygen so it does not burn when it’s compressed. Extract the produced methane. It doesn’t smell, so it can in region where people live.
So the high cost is in finding proper location and digging deep hole- and deep is something 1 km or more deep.
An alternative could something like a pipelauncher. You make a big pipe- 50 meter diameter and 1 km tall. You make like a ship- in a shipyard and launch it from shipyard. One needs deep water. You float it vertically. So pipelauncher is pipe with the top capped. you float it, then sink to open end into sea floor. So unlike pipelauncher it doesn’t float, it’s stuck in the mud of sea floor. But you could at some point float it out of the mud [with air displacement which can provide enormous buoyancy] .
So it’s stuck in the mud and filled with ocean water. Now have top 10 – 20 meter of pipe strong enough so one can remove sea water so that it’s 10 to 20 meter below sea level [a pit to put the garbage]. The garbage can float in the water, but like say wood/sawdust it does not float well. So like an iceburg, 10% of it might float above the water.
So when have 10 meter of pile garbage floating one could 90 meter underwater. At this point, you remove 10 meter of sea water below the pile of garbage, thereby giving a another 10 meter to stack more garbage on top of it. And you repeat this until the 1 km pipe is filled with garbage.
So this thing has airlock to transfer garbage shipped to it, into the pipe.
So remains sealed and one can also extract methane.
So with either pit in ground or in the water one could use train or ship to transport the garbage. And one’s normal garbage truck delivered to a train and/or ship terminal.
Nuclear waste on the Moon? But we need the Moon!
The problem with nuclear waste on Earth is that Earth has life, has atmosphere, and water table.
With the Moon, one has life where you put life. Feathers fall like rocks, and no water table.
So problem with nuclear waste, is there is numerous ways the waste can migrate. A dramatic example is russian’s partial meltdown of chernobyl with radioactive material getting to Sweden and beyond.
With the Moon one could have complete meltdown and it’s not going to go further than, say 100 km distance- ever. Or the initiate impact of the nuclear waste would be about as far as it ever goes.
So if have impact zone of 100 km diameter, most of it stays within that zone. Some would get out, but when it lands it generally stay put, though one also has gardening effect from natural impactors.
So say you are at 50 km from the 100 km diameter zone’s perimeter. And there has been million of tons of radioactive waste crashed into the 100 km diameter zone. One would probably have a measurable amount of radioactive waste easily detectable- though not dangerous if in spacesuit.
So don’t use that soil to make food from.
Instead one could use this area for nuclear power plants and have short distance to transport it’s waste.. Or there no reason one has to live in this hot zone- as there is other vast regions of the Moon which are available.
Or on Earth we might put nuclear waste underground- as part of a way to isolate the waste. On the Moon stuff on the surface is isolated from the rest of the lunar surface- more completely isolated for millions of year than is possible on Earth..
The problem with nuclear waste is agriculture. If food were made synthetically instead of by growing plants, we wouldn’t care so much if radioisotopes got spread all over. Letting all that farmland/pastureland go back to nature (even a slightly radioactive one) would be better for the environment anyway.
I would think that the delta V required for a Sun-impact mission could be reduced significantly by judicious use of slingshot manoeuvres. For an example of a similar approach see the Ulysses mission. (This was a Solar polar orbit mission, which requires zero velocity in the direction of any of the planetary orbits.)
Admittedly, the stuff would be in space for years; but who cares?
If we really wanted to colonize beyond Earth, we would send trash not to the sun, but to the next place we wanted to go. That way, there would be available raw materials without the need to mine and refine. Well, maybe some refining, but then there may be sources of energy to aid in that process.
I don’t do orbital mechanics, so can someone explain how sending something into the sun would take more delta-v than sending it to Pluto?
Going to Pluto, or sending something completely out of the solar system, requires only about 40% more velocity than the earth currently has around the sun. Sending it to the sun requires completely killing off that velocity, so that it can fall into the sun.
That seems fine for the direct ‘getting there/landing’ approach.
But it doesn’t seem “complete”.
That is:
Postulate a competent Mars mission sitting in LEO with (say) 11km/s of delta vee. Why can I not slingshot Mars with that exact ship (departing on a different vector/timing) and crashland it into the Sun? (I don’t need to -land-, orbit velocity level impacts do the job.)
Most of the delta-v needed is the last bits (because the gravity is strongest there? – *Mercury* to Sol is still about 15km/s!). Slingshots are great, but I believe there’s a limit on how much that can get you because Mars isn’t a point mass and you don’t want to crash into it. Maybe you can do it with multiple encounters somehow, but…
At Earth distance from the Sun, sun escape is 42.1 km.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escape_velocity
With hohmann one adds earth’s orbital velocity- so about
42.1 -30 is 12 km/sec of delta-v needed to added to trajectory leaving Earth. Or from Earth high orbit one needs about 5 or 6 km/sec.
Or in terms of rocket launch from earth surface, about 16 km/sec. Or about same delta-v to softly land on the Moon.
[There are details of gravity loss and oberth effect.]
Or New Horizon flew past Pluto, and went to Pluto using solar escape trajectory: Wiki:
“On January 19, 2006, New Horizons was launched from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station directly into an Earth-and-solar escape trajectory with a speed of about 16.26 kilometers per second (58,536 km/h; 36,373 mph)”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Horizons
NASA is planing a mission to go the closest it’s ever been to the Sun- and it’s delta-v needed would be close to amount need to hit the Sun. Wiki:
“Early conceptual designs for the Solar Probe mission used a gravity assist maneuver at Jupiter to cancel the orbital angular momentum of the probe launched from Earth, in order to drop onto a trajectory close to the Sun. The Solar Probe Plus mission design simplifies this trajectory by using repeated gravity assists at Venus, to incrementally decrease the orbital perihelion to achieve multiple passes to approximately 8.5 solar radii, or about 6,000,000 km (3,700,000 mi).”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_Probe_Plus
[In terms of garbage, if using Venus, one has considerably shorter launch window than compared to Mars, but it’s still around 1 year. ]
Earth is orbiting the Sun at about 30km/s, which is several times faster than you’re orbiting around earth in LEO. To ‘fall’ into the sun you’ld need to pull away from Earth’s gravity and then kill most of that velocity, which is hardly even possible with a single-stage chemical rocket (it would need to be more than 99.95% fuel, best-case!).
That same 30k will just about get you out of the solar system entirely if you apply it in the opposite direction to speed up.
Oops, my numbers are a little off – solar escape is actually a lot less than 30km/s extra, and getting down to Sol is probably a bit less.
Slingshots would very likely be the way to go, but it’s still not very practical. 🙂 Anything non-nuclear could be incinerated for a fraction of the energy cost.
Everything is orbiting the sun at great velocity. To hit the sun you need to remove most of that velocity or you end up just changing orbit.
If don’t care about the time involved a simple and low delta-v is have trajectory to Jupiter, and using gravity assist from Jupiter, alter the vector to hit the sun.
The lowest delta-v and shorter time, would be to have trajectory to Venus, and change vector at Venus so it reaches Jupiter, then again use gravity assist at Jupiter to change the vector to intercept the Sun.
One can also use various planets with gravity assists to get to Jupiter- or Saturn.
A problem with all of the above, is you have limited by launch window and the idea is one has a lot of payloads [lots of rocket launches] going to the Sun. So this needs a lot of infrastucture, and one will have a lot idle time involved- and that costs a lot of money.
Or it probably would end up to be cheaper to go directly from Earth to the Sun and just use a lot of delta-v to do it.
But as I said, much cheaper to crash it on the Moon. Of if not worried about details of delta-v cost, one can launch a rocket per day from the Earth to the Moon.
Of course if wanted a lot tonnage delivered, one probably make a Sea Dragon- which launches from the ocean and has very large payload. Though if actually serious, one would use a Nuclear Orion.
And launch the Nuclear Orion from the ocean, also.
A slingshot to retrograde around Jupiter would reduce the Vee to something manageable. The Oberth burn at periJove would be about 1 km/sec.
Hell, just dump it into Jupiter. It’s an enemy planet after all!
Just use some of that radioactive waste to make bombs to vaporize the rest of it, and let the solar wind blow the debris out into interstellar space.