3 ms·
Hitting the Sun with Nuclear Waste
- PaulHoule 6y agoThis article is like a joke that never reaches the punch line. The author does, in one sentence, mention the physically important fact "you must cancel the tangential part of the velocity (almost) completely" but never bothers to say what the delta-V of that mission really is, what kind of enormous mass ratio is required. Instead there are pictures of real spacecraft with science-fiction-movie visual effects. We'll either be telling our grandkids that we used to have a world wide web but we lost it because of content marketing like this, or we'll build a culture that sends this junk into the heart of the sun.
- JPLeRouzic 6y agoThe article is very short but IMO its main argument is that it is very difficult to send a spacecraft into the sun: Cutting to the chase, it requires approximately 55 times more energy to get to the Sun (from the Earth) than it takes to get to Mars!
- PaulHoule 6y ago"Energy" is the wrong unit. In astronautics you would measure the difficulty of the mission with Δv, not energy. If you only had to deal with energy conservation, space travel would be easy. You have to deal with momentum conversation too, carry your own reaction mass, etc.
- tobr 6y agoI agree that the article should have gone into the details, but I take issue with how you immediately dismiss this as “content marketing” and “junk”. This is a genuinely lovely blog, worthy of more attention than it gets.
- PaulHoule 6y agoHonestly I am withering under the assault. Until last week I was using Bing instead of Google, but they just did an update to bing that removes real sites ("Grid layout css specification") and replaces them with content marketing sites. ("Here is a garbled explanation of three properties involved with CSS grid layout with injected factual errors and lots of folksy talk about warren buffet and 'your' smart phone")