When wanting to exit our solar system, do we have to always go outward from the sun in the direction of the other planets? Or can we simply travel “north”?
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While all the other posters are correct, I’m going to try to help you demonstrate what they mean.
Let’s imagine you are the sun, and your hand is the earth. A ball in your hand will represent a satellite, or whatever you’d like to exit the solar system. (In this demonstration, your arm will represent the gravitational attraction between the sun (your body) and earth (your hand)
Experiment with trying to get the ball to move in various directions like “upwards”, and “outwards”.
Now start spinning around. You’ll want to go fairly quickly, but obviously not so fast that you can’t stomach it. (You can use an office chair, or a frictionless surface). Hold the ball at arms length. This is how the sun and the earth move in relation to each other. As before, experiment with trying to get the ball going in different directions like “upwards”, and “outwards” to see how it feels, and what happens when compared to being stationary.
I expect that when you try to throw it upwards, you end up having to throw it about equally as hard as when you were stationary to get it to the same height. The ball may also go outwards inadvertently. When you try to get the ball to move outwards, you can simply let the ball go, as opposed to throwing it.
Hopefully that demonstrates what people in the comments mean when they describe needing extra fuel, inefficiency, and orbital velocity. As a bonus, a “gravity assist” is basically if your friend were doing this same thing (spinning around on a chair nearby), caught the ball you just threw, and then let it go. The ball needs to be thrown with less energy each time to get further outwards.
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