Trashing With the Stars: 2 ? Far-Fetched Ideas for Reducing Garbage on Earth

At $10,000 per Pound, Blasting Off Carrying Humanity’s Waste is Far From Risk-Free

Getting Away With It

Do you ever feel like you need to get away? Do you look at the stars and dream of outer space? Do you ever wonder if we send garbage to the Sun? Maybe that’s carrying this a bit too far. Or is it? What if the answer to our growing plastics and trash problem is just a rocket away? It sounds far-fetched, but scientists and engineers looked into the feasibility recently. What they found may surprise you.

Is waste disposal in outer space possible? Have we sent garbage to space already?** Grab your astronomy homework and let’s get cracking.

The Physics of Escape Velocity

escape velocity noun

: the minimum velocity that a moving body (such as a rocket) must have to escape from the gravitational field of a celestial body (such as the earth) and move outward into space

Before we can start packing the truck and picking up some rocket fuel on the way, we need to understand rocket science. There are some things you might need to know:

• ?25,000 mph: The speed required to escape the Earth without falling back.
• Seventeen tons: The approximate quantity of rocket fuel required, assuming a two-ton load of waste.
• Aluminum, Aluminum Perchlorate, Hydroxyl-Terminated Polybutadiene: The fuel needed for a solid rocket to propel the rocket upward.
• Liquid Hydrogen and Liquid Oxygen: The fuel the spacecraft will use after escaping the Earth’s gravity well.
• The escape velocity vesc is expressed: as vesc = Square root of√2GMr, where G is the gravitational constant, M is the mass of the attracting mass, and r is the distance from the center of that mass.?

So, grab your calculator, stop at the local gas station and fill up. It’ll be a long flight.?

Disposal Rates for the Sun

Part of any waste facility involves the incineration of that which is not suitable for landfill or recyclable. Incineration consists in burning the waste completely, and what celestial object exists close by — relatively — is best suited for Earth’s trash disposal? The Sun.?

Just think of the possibilities! We have a raging inferno about 93 million miles away, and it’s the safest place for hazardous material disposal. But there are a few downsides to this proposal.

• ?Orbit: The Earth orbits the Sun at approximately 67,000 mph, which is a problem. If you escape Earth’s gravitational pull with your fancy escape velocity, you’ll find yourself no longer circling the planet but orbiting our star — the Sun.
• Free-Falling: Sorry, Mr. Petty, but we’re discussing a different kind of free-fall. Why do satellites fall out of orbit and burn up in our atmosphere? They run out of velocity. And our rocket would have to do the same. That means a massive fuel payload and a rocket bigger than humanity’s ever built. The extra fuel, potentially, allows the deceleration of our trash rocket until the orbit destabilizes and it circles the Sun until destroyed.?
• Slingshot: No, not the kind of slingshot you made as a kid; it’s gravity-assist from planets. Depending on the rocket's orientation to the Solar System’s inner worlds — Mercury, Venus and Earth- it is possible to fly by them enough times to deboost and fall out of heliocentric orbit; thus, the Sun does what it does best — burns our rocket to ashes.
• Cost of Garbage Service: We have no rockets large enough to handle the most massive fuel payload ever, from design to government approval to building to testing to final production — Cha-Ching $$$!?

Easy enough, right?

Waste Disposal in Space

We have the technology and the tools to send our trash to the vastness of space. In August 2012, NASA’s Voyager 1 went beyond the gravitational control of our Sun — a sort of bubble called the heliosphere — into interstellar space. The craft will come within 9.3 trillion miles (1.6 light years) of the star AC+79 3888 in about 40,000 years. It’ll reach the star Sirius in about 300,000 years!

Space is mostly space, and you need a reliable rocket. You also need one that can pick up an additional 26,843 mph to escape the Sun’s gravity.?

• While SpaceX has a perfect 111 flights — and counting — without an incident, the Soyuz is the most-used rocket in the world, with more than 1,500 launches. The Soyuz’s success rate is 98%. That means thirty failures. What if there were people aboard any of those thirty failures?
• What if there were nuclear or biohazardous waste aboard even one? You see the problem. One explosion on or high above the pad could turn the world into a hazardous waste facility. Lawsuits, TMZ videos, and worldwide panic would ensue. This possibility alone makes our whole discussion moot.
• Even if you used an Ariane 5 rocket carrying 15,432 pounds, you’d have to launch 168 million fully loaded to handle the world’s 2,600,000,000,000 pounds of garbage produced annually and growing.
• The yearly cost has been estimated at $33,000,000,000,000,000,000 — that’s 33 quadrillion dollars! E.V.E.R.Y. Y.E.A.R. Try selling that to the taxpayers.

The result is that the costs and dangers are simply too high to make “waste to space” feasible. Sorry, folks.

The ? Possibility — or the 0.19% Impossibility

We won’t spend long on this one, but what about inner space? The core of the earth. The Soviet Union once drilled down 7.6 miles into the crust. It was the ‘70s; people did odd things. But not as bizarre as the persistent myth that our sixth President, John Quincy Adams, once ordered taxpayer dollars directed toward digging a hole to the earth's center. Why? Among other reasons, to contact the mole people who lived there.?

The 7.6-mile-deep hole was an impressive feat, but the earth’s center lies a bit deeper — 3,959 miles, to be exact. SPOILER ALERT!!! They didn’t make it there.

To Space or Not to Space? That is the Question

So, we’ve had fun with this topic, but there is a severe thread beneath. This world is running short of places to store or dispose of our waste safely. It probably won’t in our lifetimes, but it will happen without extraordinary recycling efforts and more innovative disposal methods. It looks like the Sun, outer space, or the earth’s core aren’t likely to happen anytime soon. But the ability to do so may come in some form we haven’t dreamed of yet. The world can change on a dime; let’s change it for the better.

**Oh, and for those who were paying attention at the start: Have we sent garbage to space? The short answer is no. However, the International Space Station does jettison waste into the void. And one could argue, based on the number of satellites still in orbit (and one car), that there’s already plenty of garbage in space. That’s all I’ll say about that.**