It seems so obvious: we have all this garbage on Earth—including incredibly dangerous radioactive waste—so why don't we just launch it into space and be rid of it? In fact, why don't we just launch it into the sun where it would be consumed in a fiery blaze to never trouble us again?

Well, for one thing rocket launches aren't cheap, so launching to space is not exactly the most cost-effective way to deal with waste. But more importantly, as this new video from MinutePhysics explains, launching anything to the sun is really damn hard.

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First, there's the issue that sometimes rockets explode, and if they are full of nuclear waste that is gonna be a bad time for a lot of people. But even assuming there are no accidents, the process would be hard. Earth is orbiting the sun at about 30 km/s, which is more than 65,000 mph. So to get a rocket to fall into the sun, we would need to launch it with enough energy to accelerate to 65,000 mph in the opposite direction of Earth's orbit. Anything short of that just puts the spacecraft in an elliptical orbit that never hits the star. New Horizons, the fastest spacecraft ever launched, left the Earth at only 36,000 mph.

In fact, we only need to launch a spacecraft at 11 km/s, or less than 25,000 mph, in the same direction of our orbit to cause the spacecraft to escape our solar system. This means that it would take less energy to launch a spacecraft to another star than our own sun (though it would take years and years to get there).

Counterintuitively, it'd actually be easier to hit the sun from Mars, or any other planet that's farther out than we are. That's because the closer you are to the sun, the faster your planet's orbiting velocity tends to be, and the more energy you need to overcome it. Even if you can't launch from another planet, launching a spacecraft to swing by Jupiter or Saturn and then do a second burn to swing back to the sun would probably be easier than launching directly from Earth. And that's in addition to a whole host of other problems.

It would be nice to dump all our waste into a fiery inferno to be forgotten forever, but for now it looks like we're stuck with it.

Source: MinutePhysics

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