On Mon, 21 Jun 2004 23:13:36 +0100, Paul Burridge
wrote:

God help us if the Chinese take over in 20 years' time.
But I was serious, Reg. There's nothing wrong with good ol' fashioned
fission. Just blast the leftover crap into space and have done with
it. It's lousy with radioactive debris anyway and the sun can swallow
everything we throw at it.

There are only two small problems with this approach, since first you
have to reach the 11.2 km/s escape velocity to escape the earth. The
Saturn V moon rocket was capable of delivering about 40 tons to escape
velocity.

With this velocity, you just end up in an orbit similar to the Earth's
orbit. In fact the Apollo 10 (or 12) third stage went into solar
orbit, but a year or two ago, it was captured by the Moon and Earth
and now it orbits the Earth for a year or two, before escaping back
into the solar orbit. With some bad luck, this stage might have hit
the Earth and imagine that it had contained 40 tons of highly
radioactive waste, which would spread into the atmosphere...

Thus, in order to avoid the risk of collisions with the earth in the
future, an additional rocket burn is required in the solar orbit to
prevent the orbit from intersecting with the orbit of the Earth. Thus
reducing the available payload.

If you want to drop something into the sun, you first must kill nearly
all of the 30 km/s orbital motion of the Earth. This would require a
huge amount of fuel and practically nothing would end up into the Sun.

It is in fact much easier to escape the solar system, since only about
43 km/s is required or 13 km/s in addition to the Earth's orbital
velocity. With Saturn V, maybe 500 kg would reach the solar escape
velocity directly.

Using Jupiter as a slingshot (as with Pioneer 11&12 and Voyager 1&2)
maybe a few tons could reach the solar escape velocity.

Unfortunately Saturn V does not exist any more and the Shuttle and the
Proton are toys compared to Saturn V. Any launch failure would also be
quite nasty with a lot of nuclear waste on board.

Paul OH3LWR