After seeing Elon Musk send thousands upon thousands of satellites into low-Earth orbit, it’s only natural to wonder, why can’t we launch all our junk into space, too? Or even straight into the sun? (You asked. We answered.)
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11 sats \ 1 reply \ @freetx 17 Nov
"garbage" and "junk" is just repurposed pieces of the earth.
An aluminum can laying on the ground, doesn't "hurt the earth". The pieces of aluminum that made the can come from the earth itself. Literally like everything else we use.
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14 sats \ 0 replies \ @Fabs 17 Nov
What about plastics which degrade into microplastics?
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22 sats \ 1 reply \ @alt 17 Nov
A good article. Surprisingly, reaching the sun is actually quite difficult. Earth travels around the sun at around 67,000 miles per hour, which keeps it in a roughly circular orbit at 1A.U. This means any trash we launch into space is also going at roughly that speed.
In order for trash to reach the sun, you really need to slow it down significantly so that the sun's gravity can pull it down closer, but 67,000 mph is incredibly fast. We just can't build a rocket big enough to carry enough fuel to make that sort of deceleration feasible on a large scale.
The missions we have sent to the sun and Mercury are necessarily small craft, and most of the decelerating is done through several gravity assists from other planets, which means complicated trajectories and more chance of things going wrong. Not how we want to be handling our trash!
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @ch0k1 OP 17 Nov
Interesting point! I haven't thought of that
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10 sats \ 2 replies \ @OT 17 Nov
We should dig a hole 100km deep and just gradually fill it up. When its full, dig another.
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0 sats \ 1 reply \ @alt 17 Nov
So just take a piece of land, and then fill it over time?
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10 sats \ 0 replies \ @OT 17 Nov
I can't find it at the moment, but there was this show where they explored different (and often radical) ideas. One of them was to build a massive landfill like 50km long, wide and deep (can't remember the exact size). Landfill is compressed and dumped into this massive hole could hold all the US rubbish for 100 years.
The title of the post triggered the memory of this idea. I guess digging really deep into the earths crust must also be expensive, but probably not as much as getting it into space.
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