Why can’t we send earths toxic waste towards the sun to one day be incinerated?
In: Technology
2 main reasons that I can think of
1. Cost: A quick google search says SpaceX can send a payload to the ISS for about $2700 per kg (~$1240 per lb) so getting it on a one way trip is going to be even more expensive since you can’t reuse anything and you’re sending it a lot farther.
2. Safety: If you spill a barrel something off the back of a truck, there will be a lot of work to clean it up and protect the environment/water/air but it can be managed on a local/regional basis. Now picture if there was a Challenger Shuttle type disaster, now thousands of pounds of toxic waste is widely distributed in the atmosphere and is a global catastrophe. i.e compare the distribution of spilling 1/4 teaspoon of water vs a huge vape cloud
Movement in space doesn’t work like on earth. Yes there is no air resistance and things don’t stop moving, but due to gravitation, they change path constantly. So you can’t just push something into the direction of the sun and expect it o get there someday. Earth rotates around the sun like a satellite around the earth. If you’d push a satellite towards earth you would only slightly displace his orbit towards earth from the point of pushing once and then it would be stable again.
To actually crash something into the body it’s orbiting you’d need to stop their “sideways” movement that keeps them in orbit. Earths orbital “sideways” speed is 30km/s or 67000 mph. To “break” this much speed in space would be extremely costing, other alternatives are much more viable for much less effort.
It is around $28,000 per kg for spacex to launch which is the cheapest. Waste typically comes in 250L drums depending on type. This would be between 200 and 250kg depending on density. Just launching 1 drum into orbit is too expensive never mind away to the sun.
Liftings things out of earths gravity is very hard and expensive. Every kilogram costs 50k$ as of now, and we have A LOT of toxic waste.
Also some waste has valuable stuff in it we could recycle.
“one day” sometime in the future, we could do it, if we wanted. Maybe we will, maybe not. Right now, its simply not worth it. It would be far too expensive and dangerous, especially when we have plenty of ways to securely store toxic and nuclear waste on earth, for cheap.
We could. It would just be very expensive. Earth’s escape velocity is 12km/s. That means you need to accelerate things to that speed to escape Earth’s gravity. Better to deal with things on the ground if you can. At some point the burning of rocket fuel is doing more damage than lifting the bad things into space.
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