It’s everywhere.
Clogging up our landfills, rivers, seas, releasing a foul stench into the air, always getting
in the way and making life worse for us here on Earth.
We’re talking, of course, about trash.
Even with an increasing number of people recycling and using alternative methods of disposal,
our trash problem is a big one - a global output of around 2.6 trillion pounds per year.
So why can’t we just get rid of it altogether by launching it into the sun?
After all, we’re crowded enough as it is here and there’s a whole lot of emptiness
in space.
Well, there’s actually a slew of problems with throwing our garbage right into the bright
star of our solar system.
So as much as you’d like to launch trash on the streets and the most persistent telemarketers
you encounter right into the sun, here’s why that can’t really happen.
First of all, the decision to launch mass amounts of trash into space would have to
either be made by the government, or offered as a service by a corporation.
In either case, the first thing they would do before even getting into the logistics
of such an operation, is look at cost.
Here we discover our first obstacle: launching material into space on a probe costs around
$10,000 per pound, or $22,000 per kilogram.
That means throwing out the broken PlayStation 2 you found in your room when visiting mom
and dad would cost you around $20,000.
And when we expand this concept to include the entire US population, rather than just
one person Marie Kondo-ing their apartment, the obstacles increase exponentially.
According to the Environmental Protection Agency, in 2017 the US produced 267.8 million
tons of waste for the year.
If we use the costs associated with launching material into space, that means taking care
of the garbage produced just within the US would amount to around $5.356 quadrillion
per year.
Otherwise known as too much.
Beyond that, BBC Future estimated the cost of launching the globe’s 2.6 trillion pounds
of trash per year into space would be $33 quadrillion.
Current global GDP sits at around $77 trillion, which presents an obvious problem.
With costs this outrageous, even if engineers somehow managed to decrease the money needed
to launch materials into space by a factor of 10, the cost of launching all the world’s
trash into space would still be many, many times the global GDP.
To add to the financial impossibilities of throwing our trash into the Sun, scientists
estimate 168 million rocket launches would be needed every year to get all our trash
off the Earth.
In 2019, there were a total of 102 orbital launch attempts worldwide, only 97 of which
reached orbit.
Even if every country on Earth pooled their resources, we have nowhere near the amount
of facilities and personnel needed to handle 168 million launches a year.
Using such a financially and logistically impossible system would do nothing but make
us into a planet of completely bankrupt hoarders.
Of course, that’s just talking about the cost to launch trash into space, not directly
into the sun.
The cost of doing the latter would actually be much, much higher than putting trash into
a space orbit.
Why is that?
Let’s say engineers come up with a miracle that gets the cost of sending trash into the
Sun down to normal, comprehensible amounts.
How would we physically do it?
Well, as you’ll soon see, launching rockets into the Sun is a nearly impossible task,
simply because of physics.
First of all, the sun is 93 million miles away.
So imagine you took a road trip from LA to New York, which is about 2,790 miles.
And then do it 33,333 more times.
Assuming driving your imaginary space car through the solar system worked and old age
didn’t get you first, congratulations, you’re theoretically at the sun!
Except space doesn’t work like that at all, which is also why we tend to die in it without
protection.
The problem with getting into the Sun isn’t just the immense amount of distance you have
to cover, it’s the challenge of overcoming the Earth’s angular momentum and creating
a trajectory towards the Sun itself.
Here’s the strange thing about approaching the Sun: even though the star at the center
of our universe exerts an immense gravitational pull, sending spacecraft towards it is actually
much harder than sending spacecraft away from it, towards the outer reaches of our solar
system.
The reason has to do with orbital mechanics.
Basically, the Earth is circling the Sun at tremendous speeds, around 67,000 miles per
hour, in a sideways motion relative to the star.
This motion is good for Earth and everyone on it, because it keeps the planet from collapsing
in towards the Sun.
Generally, the closer a planet is to the center of our solar system, the faster it has to
travel in its orbit, which is what makes approaching the center of the universe more challenging
than approaching the outer limits.
Also, when NASA wants to send a probe away from the Sun - to Mars, for example - the
craft can actually use Earth’s momentum to aid in its acceleration.
However, to send a probe towards the Sun - for example, when NASA sent the Parker Solar Probe
towards the sun in 2018 - the craft has to accelerate in the opposite direction of Earth’s
orbit to match Earth’s velocity so it can cancel it out.
Then, and only then, can the probe start falling in an orbit inwards towards the Sun.
The change in velocity required to achieve this transfer orbit from the Earth to the
Sun - known as the delta-v by scientists - is pretty much impossible for our current spacecraft
to attain.
The delta-v, which simply speaking is how much speed a spacecraft should gain or lose
to to reach a certain destination, for reaching the Sun has been estimated at 13.24 miles
per second (21.3 km/s).
Why must the probe be launched counter to Earth’s orbital velocity in the first place?
Well, if a probe was shot directly towards the direction of the Sun, it would still retain
Earth’s sideways momentum, leading to it traveling in a somewhat diagonal path, missing
the sun by a long shot, and most likely settling into its own independent orbit.
If the probe is launched in an opposite direction from Earth’s orbit, but still not fast enough
to completely cancel out the Earth’s 67,000 mile per hour traveling speed, it would still
retain some of the sideways momentum and miss the Sun.
However, 67,000 miles per hour is an incredibly high speed for a space probe to attain.
As a comparison, the launch speed needed for a probe to overcome Earth’s gravity is around
25,000 miles per hour.
Probes accelerating to get to Mars required a speed of 29,000 miles per hour - not that
big a difference from the launch speed.
So this theoretical probe traveling to the Sun has to make its way to the center of the
solar system while also shedding as much sideways speed from Earth’s orbit as possible.
The solution NASA came up with for the sun-bound Parker Solar Probe was using Venus as a gravity
assist.
Gravity assists help spacecraft increase or slow down their momentum.
To put it simply, the craft swings around a planet to get a velocity boost from the
planet’s gravity and angular momentum.
If the craft swings around the planet in a direction opposite to the planet’s orbit,
it loses momentum instead.
In the case of the Parker Solar Probe, it will use Venus for several gravity assists
in order to continue to slow down its sideways velocity and make a closer approach towards
the Sun during each orbit.
Meanwhile, the Sun’s gravity will exert an increasingly stronger pull on the Parker
Solar Probe each time, drawing it closer and closer to its surface with each new orbit.
The gravity of the Sun will also rapidly increase the speed of the probe, which is expected
to reach a velocity of 430,000 miles per hour (692,000 km/h) when it arrives at the closest
point to the Sun in its mission, around 3.83 million miles (6 million kilometers) from
the star’s surface.
To understand just how rapidly the probe will be moving at that time, a speed of 430,000
miles per hour means it would be able to travel from Washington, D.C. to Tokyo in less than
a minute.
So even though it is theoretically possible to launch a probe full of trash towards the
sun, the Parker Solar Probe mission should make some huge flaws in this plan obvious.
First of all, in order to approach the Sun as close as planned, the probe will use seven
gravity assists from Venus during a seven year long mission.
That is an extremely long mission timeframe requiring a lot of set up, fuel and preparation
- just for this one mission.
The cost of the Parker Solar Probe launch and mission has been estimated at $1.5 billion
dollars.
If we were to multiply all the time, effort and money poured into the Parker Solar Probe
mission by the absurdly large amount of probes we would need to get rid of Earth’s trash
each year - again, estimated at around 168 million - we would need an enormous amount
of people and facilities with almost unlimited funds working on the project non-stop.
Lastly, the Parker Solar Probe is only meant to get close to the Sun’s surface, not rocket
directly into the Sun itself.
That means that this long, arduous mission doesn’t even have to cancel out all the
Earth’s momentum initially, just most of it.
If we want to shoot our trash into the sun, we would have to employ even faster probes
and more fuel than the Solar Probe mission.
Even though a mission to launch trash into the Sun seems daunting at the moment, the
Parker Solar Probe mission shows us that science is expanding the limits of our capabilities
every year.
The probe has already set the record for the closest ever artificial object we have sent
to the Sun, beating the Helios 2 spacecraft’s record of reaching a 26.55 million mile (42.73
million kilometer) distance from the Sun’s surface in 1976.
So do you think we will ever develop our technology to the point where we can realistically launch
our trash into the Sun?
Or should we focus on minimizing our trash output altogether, and then coming up with
more Earth-based solutions for our world’s waste problem?
That’s something we can’t tell you, but we would love to know what you think.
Let us know in the comments!
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