We should send all our rubbish to Venus or to the sun. Let it burn up in them

seamus wrote: »

The amount of energy required to launch rubbish into orbit is considerably larger than just burning it. A Falcon 9 has a payload of 22 tonnes and each launch releases about 350 tonnes of CO2. Where just burning the 22 tonnes will release about 22 tonnes of CO2 (give or take)

Even if you were to strip down the rocket so it could carry more, you're never going to bridge that gap that makes a launch 16 times more expensive than burning.

Unless we come up with a more efficient method of launching rockets (nothing is on the horizon), or other methods of getting things into orbit - like a skyhook - then recycling, composting and incineration are the only way forward.

A skyhook? What the fcuk is that?

ShatterAlan wrote: »

A skyhook? What the fcuk is that?

It's an old joke.

But it's also a theoretical way of putting things into orbit.

Basically you put a space station into orbit with a long cable attached to it. When you want to put something into orbit, you fly an aircraft up to meet the end of the cable, attach your payload to it, and then it gets hoisted up by the space station into orbit.

You also have a space elevator, which is the same idea except the space station is in a geostationary orbit, connected to the surface with a big steel cable. You can then send things up and down to the space station using the cable.

The net energy required to send something up the cable into orbit is technically the same, but you can use other forms of propulsion, like electric motors, that create far less pollution.

Both ideas are theoretically possible, the physics are sound, but beyond our current technology level.

seamus wrote: »

It's an old joke.

But it's also a theoretical way of putting things into orbit.

Basically you put a space station into orbit with a long cable attached to it. When you want to put something into orbit, you fly an aircraft up to meet the end of the cable, attach your payload to it, and then it gets hoisted up by the space station into orbit.

You also have a space elevator, which is the same idea except the space station is in a geostationary orbit, connected to the surface with a big steel cable. You can then send things up and down to the space station using the cable.

The net energy required to send something up the cable into orbit is technically the same, but you can use other forms of propulsion, like electric motors, that create far less pollution.

Both ideas are theoretically possible, the physics are sound, but beyond our current technology level.

So dump garbage into ORBIT so that it floats around the Earth in one massive belt of shit. We could create our own Saturn's ring made up of crap.

AllForIt wrote: »

I don't see why you would have to send it anywhere specific except into space.

Well, Earth orbit is technically "space", and there is already crap up there, enough to present a small risk to the things we want up there, such as satellites and the International Space Station.

Shall we try further out, free of Earth's gravitational pull? You'd have to spend a lot more energy to do that, and once you do, your package is still in orbit around the Sun, like the Earth is. It could drift away, then drift back again, relative to the Earth. You'd have to spend yet more energy to change its orbit so it drifts further away over time and stays away, but it would still be orbiting the Sun. OP wants us to de-orbit the rubbish so that it falls in to the Sun, which can be done: yet more energy needed to slow it down - much more than you've spent so far, because the relative speeds are so much higher.

Speed is easy, and we have plenty of it already, just being in orbit around the Sun: it's changing the speed that gets expensive. Astrophysicists talk about the cost of "Delta-Vee", or acceleration, which takes fuel and reaction mass. These are precious commodities in space flight: it takes a massive amount of energy just to get them in space at all, and once they're up there, they're conserved like water in a desert, used only when you really have to.

Keyzer wrote: »

Good idea, lets destroy another planet with our crap instead of taking responsibility for our actions and doing something constructive about it.

Blue sky thinking...

They would do the same to us given the chance. The boys on the Sun have big expansion plans.