that feel when a bunch of horsekids talk nerd stuff on a horse picture.

“And now it’ll… well, It was SUPPOSED to blow up in the SUN, but that works too.”

@mathprofbrony  
Well…sort of, but not because doing it slower reduces the delta-V requirements (it does not). Instead, if you don’t care how long it takes to get to the Sun then you can use gravity assists to drop the perihelion down over time (as I said, this is precisely what the Solar Probe is going to do over the next six years or so). But that adds a lot of complication (i.e., you now need a spacecraft with all the bits and bobs to keep it under control) that keeps it expensive.
 
Alternatively, you could use a solar sail; naively you would think it would be impossible to reduce the distance to the Sun with one, but in fact it’s possible if it’s used correctly, kind of like tacking in a sailboat. Still, same problems as the above, plus solar sails are very experimental nowadays (though much less so than space elevators!)
 
Ultimately, the killer is just that there’s cheaper ways of dealing with any waste you care to think of on Earth. Chemical wastes can be chemically fixed in inert forms and buried in suitable locations or recycled, nuclear wastes…well, there are a lot of ways to potentially deal with nuclear waste that don’t involved blasting it off into space.
 
 
@redweasel  
When I say “ridiculously huge” I mean “literally thousands of kilometers across” kind of huge. Sure, it’s still smaller than a space elevator, but that’s so big that the curvature of the Earth is a serious issue–parts of the accelerator will be very deep underground, deep enough that there’s no real way to actually build it. Besides, like all other ground-based acceleration schemes (that is, all plans for space launch that do all of the acceleration at ground level) air resistance is a big problem. If you get up to orbital velocities on the ground, your spacecraft is going to act as if it’s hit a white-hot brick wall the moment it leaves the accelerator. If you don’t, you still need a rocket stage to get into orbit…
 
Honestly, if you want an infrastructural launch method that you can actually do with current technology, some kind of rotovator is probably your best bet. It’s basically a tiny (~few hundred to few thousand kilometer long) space elevator that orbits much lower and spins. You then have a rocket that jumps into a suborbital trajectory and rendezvouses and docks with the rotovator just outside the sensible atmosphere, then undocks and drops back to Earth later. The upshot is that you can build this out of existing materials like kevlar or vectran and it will still (theoretically) provide a big benefit to launch cost, compared to existing methods.

Wait, is this supposed to be before or after she loses her job?

@Workable Goblin
 
That’s very interesting. I didn’t realize it would take more delta-v than escaping Earth’s gravity well, to drop out of solar orbit!
 
Of course, that gets the junk to the Sun in a straight drop. If we don’t care whether it takes a hundred years to circle around and decay in, is it easier? Perhaps with a ramscoop or some other device that could slowly convert solar energy into delta-v? Or maybe we would just toss the stuff gently toward the Oort cloud?

@Workable Goblin
 
well I did say it was prohibitively expensive to build them. I haven’t run the numbers though. I just think it’s a little more doable to make a giant circular accelerator, than a 36000km long nanotube.
 
also yeah I didn’t think of air resistence. that’d stop any tether from hitting the ground too fast.

@redweasel  
Well, single single-wall nanotubes theoretically have about enough strength to stand up to the tension of being pulled outward, but of course the trouble is how you could possibly make a 36 000 km long nanotube…not to mention whether a 36 000 km long nanotube would actually have sufficient strength.
 
(It’s a lot easier on Mars, of course).
 
As for falling, that shouldn’t be a problem, actually, for two reasons. First of all, if there’s a break the portion above the break will pull away from Earth and only the portion below the break will fall down. If the break is close to the Earth, obviously this means very little is actually falling.
 
Secondly, any vaguely practical space elevator will have a rather low sectional density–it’ll be more like a very, very long piece of paper than a huge building. What this means is that it will tend to be greatly slowed by the atmosphere and (probably) burn up during reentry–if you look at modern concept designs, they literally are huge paper-like strips of nanotubes stretching from Earth to geostationary orbit. One of those falling on Earth would be about as bad as, well, dropping a huge ribbon of paper on Earth–it won’t be like the elevator fall in Red Mars that does a huge amount of damage.
 
As for a “human cyclotron,” if you run the numbers circular accelerators…just don’t work. You either need them to be ridiculously huge or have literally impossible-to-survive gee forces. Okay for slinging up bulk material, though there are still probably better options, but no good for people.

@Workable Goblin
 
yeah, we’re slingshotting around the sun so fast, trying to hit it is like trying to hit something with a pingpong ball, in the center of one of those spinning rooms they have at amusement parks, where you get pressed against the wall.
 
as for space elevators, I know of no actual or theoretical substance that wouldn’t pull itself apart like stretched taffy, from the gravitational forces of its own weight. not even nanotubes. that’s what I thought the big obstacle was, that any sort of cord going up that high would pull itself apart.
 
well, that and the ludicrous destruction a cord that big would cause, if it ever snapped and all fell down to the earth from geosynchronous orbit.
 
personally I think a human cyclotron is the cheapest way to get a man into space. you can do all the slow acceleration, looping a mile underground, and then you just gotta redirect it out of the loop, and off toward the horizon. still prohibitively expensive to build, but it doesn’t take much in terms of nonrenewable energy sources.

@mathprofbrony  
You’re actually much too pessimistic on the cost estimates for space elevators. Theoretically, they should be able to lower launch prices to something on the order of a few dollars per pound/kilogram of launch mass, which is closer to a factor of 100-1000 less than current launch prices (several thousand dollars per pound/kilogram, typically). Of course, that’s assuming you can build it reasonably inexpensively…which no one knows how to do.
 
On the other hand…it’s much, much, much harder to drop payloads into the Sun than you think. There is no such thing as a “stable zone”; instead, every orbit has its characteristic velocity, and to hit the Sun you pretty much need to zero out your orbital velocity relative to it (“pretty much” because the Sun is not, of course, a point). Earth is moving about 30 km/s relative to the Sun, so you would have to do a delta-V of 30 km/s, more or less, to hit the Sun from Earth orbit…which is a bit of a problem, because that is a HUGE delta-V. Just getting into orbit requires about 9-10 km/s of delta-V, and because the rocket equation is exponential getting 30 km/s is a lot more than 3 times more difficult. That’s why there have only been a few space missions to Mercury, and why the Parker Solar Probe that’s launching later this year has to do a ton of Venus flybys to just get close to the Sun. It’s really, really not cost-effective to dump anything into the Sun, not even nuclear waste.

poor vee.
 
she’s a bitch but doesn’t really deserve it.
 
also love the fork used as antena for the remote

oh that’s… not good… take cover!

huh

Well this is a lot of “diry work” Hah! Bad pun. XD

A reliable space elevator should, in theory, reduce ground-to-orbit costs for a pound of matter by a factor of 10, and from orbit to the long fall into the sun is just any quick burn to get you out of the stable zone. I don’t see it ever being economic for daily waste, but at present storage costs it would have an ROI within a reasonable time frame for nuclear waste, which is quite expensive to store safely.

@OneMoreAnonymous  

 
Yet. Currently the bill is too high, but I see it being possible.

And that’s why this hasn’t been tried in real life.