Specifically the side that does not get exposed to the earth so trash won’t be pulled back.
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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.
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