4 ms·
The Earth's orbital velocity around the Sun is ~30km/s. You need to cancel almost all of that out in order to shift to a trajectory that intersects the Sun, and
by mnw21cam 3y ago
The Earth's orbital velocity around the Sun is ~30km/s. You need to cancel almost all of that out in order to shift to a trajectory that intersects the Sun, and that trajectory still has you impacting the Sun at quite some speed.
The Moon's orbital velocity around the Earth is ~1km/s. A slingshot manoeuvre around the Moon isn't going to help nearly enough here.
One of the most efficient ways to get to the Sun is to leave Earth in the same direction it is going (and yes you can use a Moon slingshot to help here if you want) which will result in your rocket going further away from the Sun than the Earth. Once you're out in the region of the outer planets, you'll be travelling a lot slower and won't need to cancel out nearly as much velocity. Neptune's orbital velocity is ~5.5km/s, and if your rocket has an apohelion around there and a perihelion around Earth then you'll be travelling slower than that. However, it still takes a huge amount of delta-v to get out to the region of Neptune and then cancel out your velocity relative to the Sun.
Compare that to the amount of delta-v required to de-orbit an object from low Earth orbit. The object's velocity around the Earth is going to be about 7.9km/s, but it only requires a delta-v of around 100m/s to put it into a nice predictable atmospheric entry. That's comparatively nothing.