I've been curious about his last paragraph for a while - send trash out into nowhere - and unless I'm being an idiot, it looks like we'd still be paying (at the

I've been curious about his last paragraph for a while - send trash out into nowhere - and unless I'm being an idiot, it looks like we'd still be paying (at the author's implied Saturn-V costs) ~48 million USD per short ton of waste. Compare this to Yucca Mountain's current cost of $9b for ~77k short tons of storage (~$117k/sh tn) and it's still pretty awful. We do get the ongoing benefit of no upkeep and happy NIMBYs for spacebound waste, but there are always the downsides of making a mess in our space-backyard (what will the aliens think when they come to visit? How embarrassing. Almost as bad, what if it comes back a la Futurama or gets in the way of future endeavors) and losing access to that waste if we figure out a means of making use of waste in the future.