Specifically the side that does not get exposed to the earth so trash won’t be pulled back.
In: 0
It costs about 5000$ per kilogram to launch something into space. I’d reckon at least 10 billion kilograms of trash is created each year which would be far too impractical to send to space.
The trash wouldn’t be pulled back from the moon any more than the moon rocks would regardless of the side it was on.
The… environmental concerns aside, just launching stuff to the low earth orbit is hideously expensive. The price tag per kilogram is somewhere between 10,000$ and ten times that, so there is no conceivable way for that to be even remotely affordable.
The trash isn’t really a problem, either. Once it’s piled up in landfills it’s more or less fine there, and a trash rocket wouldn’t clean up any of the microplastics and the like from the environment. It might be tempting to think about launching radioactive waste up there instead (we can’t make _that_ much of it, right?) but rocketry runs a risk of catastrophic failure, and a rocket loaded up with nuclear waste that explodes violently in the atmosphere would be very, very bad news, even if we by some miracle managed to make that economic.
Because it takes a ridiculous amount of energy to transport one kilogram of anything to outer space. You couldn’t just send a rocket with tons of trash up towards the moon, you’d need hundreds of rockets each year/month to do that. Plus the rockets themselves (and the fuel) weigh an immense amount which you *also* need to get up into space.
Not to mention that reusable rockets aren’t really operational right now
If you have a semi-trailer full of trash that you want to send to the Moon it would cost about $200M and burn 300 tones of fuel by using the latest rocket technologies. A larger city might end up with a million semi-trailers of trash a year. So from a single city it would cost about $200T That is more money than 50 US federal budgets.
Thank you for the answers!
It’s incredibly expensive to launch materials into space. It would be even costlier and pointless to put it on the dark side of the moon. A more reasonable approach would be to simply send it out far into empty space. Still, this brings up the problem of cost, though. In short, it’s way too expensive
Launching things to the Moon is extremely expensive.
If governments were willing to spend that money fixing the problem, then we wouldn’t need to launch it to the Moon anyway.
It’s like climate change–the problem isn’t that we don’t know how to solve it. We already know exactly how to fix it. It’s just that governments aren’t willing to pay to make it happen.
The Tyranny of the Rocket Equation.
In order to get into orbit, you need to be going a specific speed while outside the atmosphere. That speed is about 25,000 mph. Which is a lot. We don’t have any means of getting up to that speed except with rockets, but rockets have a problem. In order to get up to X speed at Y height, you need some amount of fuel, but in order to keep going you’re going to need more fuel after that, which needs to be carried using the previous fuel, which means even more fuel…
You get the picture. It’s called the Tyrrany of the Rocket Equation because heavier payloads require exponentially more fuel to get into orbit. Just making a bigger rocket doesn’t help much, because you need more fuel for those too. We get around this problem somewhat by using stages, dropping off empty fuel tanks so the remaining fuel can get the now lighter rocket going faster, but that just makes the problem less bad instead of making it go away.
The upshot of all this is that lifting all the trash humanity has produced into orbit would require enough energy to literally reverse climate change. Like, suck out all the excess heat in the atmosphere, use insane magitech which does not and probably cannot exist to transform that heat directly into rocket fuel, and blast it all into orbit (incidentally giving us climate change again, because we just released all the heat back into the atmosphere). Or, like, maybe if we turned all the fissile material on Earth into nuclear bombs, then somehow mined even more from asteroids, then detonated all of that in our own atmosphere, instantly dooming all surface life on the planet, that might also let us lift up all that trash into space. Or maybe if we found a good-sized asteroid, directed it at Earth, used the magitech again to absorb all the energy and turn it into delta-v for escaping Earth’s gravity, that would do it. While also cooking the entire planet.
Space isn’t a solution to any of our problems. There’s a reason we stopped spending so much on it once the Cold War ended, and it’s because once you have a satelite network up and running there is genuinely no reason to do anything there until your species starts constructing a dyson swarm. Everything will always be easier to do within the atmosphere, because you can do that without accelerating things to 25,000 mph.
Why can’t we just reduce, instead of creating new problems for future generations to sort out.
There are a few reasons why this wouldn’t work as a long-term solution for Earth’s trash problem. First, the moon doesn’t have an atmosphere, so there is no way to keep the trash from spreading out and eventually covering the entire surface. Second, the moon doesn’t have any water, so there would be no way to break down the trash or recycle it. Finally, the moon is a very hostile environment, with extreme temperatures and no protection from the sun’s radiation.
Latest Answers