Ejecting waste in low planetary orbit should have been SOP to ensure it’s burned up on atmospheric re-entry. Leaving it in space as the Star Destroyer did is the most hazardous.
“Ejecting” being the operative word. The waste would need significant ∆V compared to the space station in order to actually fall instead of stay at a similar orbit and create a hazard.
Also, considering it could travel between systems, it couldn’t always rely on a planetary atmosphere to dump its waste on.
It would be characteristically Empire to eject the waste in a geosynchronous orbit so it stays there for years and years, as a “fuck you” to the planet below.
Hmm, it’s not a big deal for the Star Destroyer to just eject the waste… they can just fly away from it after. But the Death Star is the size of a moon… if they just ejected waste the same way, it would end up orbiting the station… in a few months you’d have a cloud of trash around it.
Maybe they compact trash so that it can be more easily shipped out? Or maybe they have some kind of launching system that fires compacted trash out fast enough to escape the Death Star’s gravity?
They’d have to eject it with sufficient speed to be over whatever escape velocity is for the station. I’m guessing it’s not that high. Sure, it’s the size of a moon, but its density would be far lower. It’s hollow, more like a coarse foam.
Ejecting waste in low planetary orbit should have been SOP to ensure it’s burned up on atmospheric re-entry. Leaving it in space as the Star Destroyer did is the most hazardous.
“Ejecting” being the operative word. The waste would need significant ∆V compared to the space station in order to actually fall instead of stay at a similar orbit and create a hazard.
Also, considering it could travel between systems, it couldn’t always rely on a planetary atmosphere to dump its waste on.
It would be characteristically Empire to eject the waste in a geosynchronous orbit so it stays there for years and years, as a “fuck you” to the planet below.
Hmm, it’s not a big deal for the Star Destroyer to just eject the waste… they can just fly away from it after. But the Death Star is the size of a moon… if they just ejected waste the same way, it would end up orbiting the station… in a few months you’d have a cloud of trash around it.
Maybe they compact trash so that it can be more easily shipped out? Or maybe they have some kind of launching system that fires compacted trash out fast enough to escape the Death Star’s gravity?
They’d have to eject it with sufficient speed to be over whatever escape velocity is for the station. I’m guessing it’s not that high. Sure, it’s the size of a moon, but its density would be far lower. It’s hollow, more like a coarse foam.
Depends on whose mass estimates you like… it might have a core of high density material in the reactor.
If not you’re probably right though, escape velocity would be pretty low.