Why can’t we just launch all of Earth’s garbage into the sun?
After seeing Elon Musk send thousands upon thousands of satellites into low-Earth orbit, it’s only natural to wonder, why can’t we launch all our junk into space, too? Or even straight into the sun? (You asked. We answered.)
Aside from the moral quandaries raised by such poor stewardship of our already disheveled solar system, Earthlings probably haven’t made a habit of beaming literal garbage into space yet because we simply can’t afford to.
“It’s not cost-feasible at all. You require a lot of thrust and a lot of fuel to do that,” explained John L. Crassidis—a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at the State University of New York at Buffalo—in a call with Popular Science. Part of the challenge is that our junk can’t go just anywhere, although it certainly does so here on Earth; microplastics are literally everywhere and the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is around twice the size of Texas.
But if we could, somehow, gather it all up and bag it for space, “You’ve got to get it away from the Earth’s influence,” at least 22,000 miles from the surface, warned Crassidis. Otherwise, we’d risk our junk colliding with satellites and eventually finding its way back home. We already have a relatively unregulated orbital junk problem, with tens of thousands of known objects up there and counting. Much of it burns up upon entering Earth’s atmosphere, fortunately, but earlier this year a chunk of the space station survived reentry and actually crashed into a home in Florida.
