nivek
As Above So Below
I'm calling a little bunk on this explanation of rocket velocities departing earth to the sun, why can't we send a rocket forwards in earth's orbit instead of behind?. Then there's the issue of using more energy to reach our sun than another star, I have to give it some deeper thought but these two things don't seem right.
Why We Can't Just Launch Waste Into the Sun Explained in 3 Minutes
Why We Can't Just Launch Waste Into the Sun Explained in 3 Minutes
First, there's the issue that sometimes rockets explode, and if they are full of nuclear waste that is gonna be a bad time for a lot of people. But even assuming there are no accidents, the process would be hard. Earth is orbiting the sun at about 30 km/s, which is more than 65,000 mph. So to get a rocket to fall into the sun, we would need to launch it with enough energy to accelerate to 65,000 mph in the opposite direction of Earth's orbit. Anything short of that just puts the spacecraft in an elliptical orbit that never hits the star. New Horizons, the fastest spacecraft ever launched, left the Earth at only 36,000 mph.
In fact, we only need to launch a spacecraft at 11 km/s, or less than 25,000 mph, in the same direction of our orbit to cause the spacecraft to escape our solar system. This means that it would take less energy to launch a spacecraft to another star than our own sun (though it would take years and years to get there).