After seeing Elon Musk send thousands of satellites into low Earth orbit, it’s natural to wonder why we can’t just launch all our junk into space, too. Or will it be exposed directly to the sun? (you he asked. we answered. )
Apart from the moral difficulties caused by our already poor management; disordered In our solar system, Earthlings probably aren’t in the habit of sending literal garbage into space yet. Because we simply don’t have that luxury.
“It’s just not cost-effective. It requires a lot of thrust and a lot of fuel,” John L. Clasidis, a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at the State University of New York at Buffalo, said by phone. popular science. One of the challenges is that our junk can’t go anywhere. However, it certainly is here on Earth. Microplastics are literally everywhere, including the Great Pacific Garbage Patch Twice the size of Texas.
But even if they were somehow able to collect it all, pack it into a bag and send it into space, “it would have to be at least 32,000 miles from Earth’s surface and away from Earth’s influence,” Krasidis cautioned. did. Otherwise, there is a risk that the junk will crash into the satellite and eventually return home. We already have a relatively unregulated orbital junk problem. tens of thousands of known objects I’m there counting. Fortunately, most of it burns up once it enters Earth’s atmosphere, but earlier this year, part of the space station survived reentry and actually crashed into a house in Florida.
Okay, but what about just firing garbage at the moon? “We definitely don’t want to send it around the moon,” Clasidis said. Do we want to pile up our trash on the moon? (Just to be clear, dear reader, I’m not.) “Something like that could backfire at some point, even on Mars,” Crassidis said. explained. “You have to think about 200 years from now, hopefully we will be colonizing.” [the red planet]. You don’t want junk there either,” he said.
Okay, but what about the sun? How ridiculous is that idea, really? “First, you have to collect this much stuff, put it in a central location, load that amount of trash onto a rocket (which can’t launch such a large payload), and send that payload into the sun.” “It’s way beyond that,” he said, suggesting it could cost trillions and trillions of dollars, “because you can only launch a certain amount at a time, right?”
Crassidis believes it may be possible to one day launch trash into the sun, assuming future technological developments make such a feat possible. Still, we still don’t know much about the impact the launch will have on the atmosphere or the existing space debris that will fall (including dead satellites and jettisoned equipment). “I hope it’s not too bad,” Mr. Clasidis said. “But maybe that’s the case, right?”
The idea of solving the earth’s garbage problem by making it a solar system problem has appeared in the world of science fiction. In the 1999 anime Planetesa space garbage ship battles all sorts of objects flying around Earth in 2075. Episode 8 of futuramaThe Earth faces destruction from a giant ball of its own garbage. meanwhile, review A 1999 episode warned that the crappy plot “foreshadows what’s to come,” but for the sake of our minds and the future of space travel, we hope that’s not the case.
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