I’m sure there’s a perfectly good reason why we haven’t done this yet. Too expensive? Would launching it into the sun cause the smoke (if there is even smoke in space) to find its way back to Earth, therefore polluting the air?

This is an incredibly stupid question.

  • Phoenixz
    4•24 days ago

    Just to add to this: rockets use a lot of fuel. And with “a lot” I mean that a rocket typically is 90% fuel, 7% rocket, 3% cargo (my numbers may be off a bit, but not by much). The further you want to go the more fuel you need, the heavier you get,the more fuel you need, and so on.

    So to move out 100 tonnes of cargo, were going to waste, say 3000 tonnes of fuel, and that is just to get it into orbit. Getting enough speed to get it to the sun would probably literally require exponential amounts of extra fuel, which would require extra fuel rockets to come up, rockets just carrying “a little bit of” fuel for another rocket.

    Then on going to the sun: the earth moves at about 30km/s around the sun. To cancel that out, you’d need a rocket capable of reaching 30km/s, which we currently -afaik- cannot. We can’t get rocket engines that can eject the burning gasses out at those soeeds, hence we can’t reach that speed, hence we can’t cancel out 30km/s. We’d need entirely new technology to be able to do that

    • @ilinamorato@lemmy.world
      3•24 days ago

      1. To get into the sun, we’d probably want to fuel the rockets in space using reaction material mined in space (from the moon or an asteroid). That would more or less eliminate the problem you’re talking about, which is why I kind of skipped over that in my comment. But you’re right; this is one of a million things that makes space travel hard and expensive.

      2. We can get up to any speed with enough time and fuel. The trash rockets would just need to get into a solar orbit, and then burn retrograde for a fairly long while. Or if you add a gravity assist in, this is doable today; the Parker Solar Probe got to (and indeed beyond) that speed, for instance. It’s easier and quicker when there aren’t squishy people aboard (we don’t tend to like acceleration much higher than 9.8m/s², for instance).