Record Yield from Fusion Experiment

The John Doe troll stated the following in message-id <sdhn7c$pkp$ snipped-for-privacy@dont-email.me:

And the John Doe troll stated the following in message-id <sg3kr7$qt5$ snipped-for-privacy@dont-email.me:

And yet, the clueless John Doe troll has itself posted yet another incorectly formatted USENET posting on Wed, 25 Aug 2021 07:14:28 -0000 (UTC) in message-id <sg4qkk$6fk$ snipped-for-privacy@dont-email.me.

The John Doe troll stated the following in message-id <sdhn7c$pkp$ snipped-for-privacy@dont-email.me:

And the John Doe troll stated the following in message-id <sg3kr7$qt5$ snipped-for-privacy@dont-email.me:

And yet, the clueless John Doe troll has itself posted yet another incorectly formatted USENET posting on Wed, 25 Aug 2021 07:26:53 -0000 (UTC) in message-id <sg4rbt$6fk$ snipped-for-privacy@dont-email.me.

The John Doe troll stated the following in message-id <sdhn7c$pkp$ snipped-for-privacy@dont-email.me:

And the John Doe troll stated the following in message-id <sg3kr7$qt5$ snipped-for-privacy@dont-email.me:

And yet, the clueless John Doe troll has itself posted yet another incorectly formatted USENET posting on Wed, 25 Aug 2021 09:45:38 -0000 (UTC) in message-id <sg53g2$pen$ snipped-for-privacy@dont-email.me.

If you have nothing to say, say nothing.

They use the slingshot effect to move vehicles to much higher orbits with minimum fuel expenditure. I would think we could do the same thing to loop a vehicle around the moon and shoot it to the sun, no? That really should be the easy part.

Seems to me the flaw in the idea is the relatively high failure rate of launching space vehicles in general. Shooting them to the sun is fine, but not so good when they don't launch properly and explode or crash back to the earth.

Low budget enough for a rock band.

How about NASA?

"Why is it so difficult? The answer lies in the same fact that keeps Earth from plunging into the Sun: Our planet is traveling very fast •¡· about 67,000 miles per hour •¡· almost entirely sideways relative to the Sun. The only way to get to the Sun is to cancel that sideways motion.

"Since Parker Solar Probe will skim through the Sun's atmosphere, it only needs to drop 53,000 miles per hour of sideways motion to reach its destination, but that's no easy feat. In addition to using a powerful rocket, the Delta IV Heavy, Parker Solar Probe will perform seven Venus gravity assists over its seven-year mission to shed sideways speed into Venus' well of orbital energy. These gravity assists will draw Parker Solar Probe's orbit closer to the Sun for a record approach of just 3.83 million miles from the Sun's visible surface on the final orbits."

or, if you prefer the business press, there's Forbes.

1. Bring enough fuel with you so that you can decelerate your payload sufficiently (i.e., have it lose as much of its relative speed with respect to the Sun as possible), and then watch your payload gravitationally free-fall into the Sun.
2. Configure enough fly-bys with the innermost planets of our Solar System •¡· Earth, Venus and/or Mercury •¡· so that the orbiting payload gets de-boosted (as opposed to the positive boosts that spacecraft like Pioneer, Voyager, and New Horizons received from gravitationally interacting with the outer planets) and eventually comes close enough to the Sun that it gets devoured.

The first option, in reality, requires so much fuel that it's practically impossible with current (chemical rocket) technology. If you loaded up a rocket with a massive payload, like you might expect for all the hazardous waste you want to fire into the Sun, you'd have to load it up with a lot of rocket fuel, in orbit, to decelerate it sufficiently so that it'd fall into the Sun. To launch both that payload and the additional fuel requires a rocket that's larger, more powerful and more massive than any we've ever built on Earth by a large margin."

and, later,

"Energetically, it costs less to shoot your payload out of the Solar System (from a positive gravity assist with planets like Jupiter) than it does to shoot your payload into the Sun."

I don't think the math works out. The moon's mass (and gravity) are too small, as it its orbital velocity around Earth.

One discussion I found:

So, even if you time everything for the best possible effect (with the vehicle now aimed "backwards" in Earth's orbit) you've only gotten rid of 1.5 km/sec of orbital velocity, out of the 29 km/sec you started with. You're about 5% of the way to a "drop into the sun" orbital-velocity target.

One crucial limit here is the moon's orbital velocity around the earth. It's only about 1 km/second. That means that when the moon is at the point in its orbit where it's moving "backwards" in the solar orbit (relative to the Earth) it's still got a solar-orbit velocity of about 28 km/second in the "forward" direction. A satellite that you slingshot around the moon is still going to have (28 - N) km/sec of solar-orbit velocity, where "N" is the satellite's approach-and- departure speed relative to the moon.

So, I think that (at best) you'd have to launch the satellite towards the moon at over 25 km/sec in order for the slingshot to leave it with a near-zero solar-orbit velocity which would let it drop into the sun. That's a huge amount of fuel to burn. And, at that speed, it's not going to manage to turn more than a few degrees as it flies by... so in order to have its final vector be aimed "backwards" in Earth's orbit you'd be slingshotting past the moon at just the wrong time to gain any real counter-solar-orbit velocity. As far as I can see it simply wouldn't gain enough delta-V to be worth the bother.

The NASA article I cited a few minutes ago points out that the solar-observatory satellite required a total of _seven_ gravitational slingshots in order to get itself into the desired orbit close to the sun.

Maybe a combination of solar sails and gravitational slingshotting? We could have a fleet of beautiful solar-sail butterflies, glittering blue with Cherenkov radiation, carrying our waste in 20-year orbits to the Sun.