I remember asking once, we don’t we just shoot our surplus trash off into the sun and was told that by the cost of launching it outweighs the benefits. Fair!

But what about all of the old satellites and space stations? Why don’t we just send a giant magnet around the earth once or twice and then slingshot all that space junk into the sun and thus giving all science fiction writers (when they return from their strike) a plot point they can no longer use in their film scripts?

Seriously though, without the cost of breaching the atmosphere, this seems really cheap to pull, why don’t we do this? Why isn’t this a standard thing?

  • @AdrianTheFrog
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    811 months ago

    Lol space is so big that even if you try, it’s hard to hit a planet. Also “ksp certified astrophysicist” is a joke, ksp is a video game which teaches you a lot about orbital physics. It’s a common joke in the Spaceflight community that ksp teaches you more about astrophysics than an actual job.

    • @[email protected]
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      311 months ago

      I’m a physicist and I love KSP. You can learn a lot of things about orbital mechanics from textbooks, but KSP offers a great way to see how everything works. One of my TAs actually used it for teaching, to illustrate homework problems.