how much to put them into a space suit and a car, strap them to a rocket and then fire them into orbit around Mars ?
Instructions unclear. I’m going to the moon on Delta IX.
Even with the explanations given here, it’s still very counter-intuitive for me.
I think the best thing would be to cut the person in half, send one half towards the sun and the other half out of the solar system.
The issue is that you’re starting from earth, and the earth already has a lot of momentum that keeps it from falling into the sun. To get an object from here to the sun you would need to counter the majority of that momentum it already has.
It’s not about the propellant, it’s about sending a message
I legitimately want to be cremated by the sun after I die. Doesn’t matter how long it takes.
Don’t worry, we all will. We all came from a sun, and will all return to one.
Knowing my luck I’ll end up in a black hole instead.
When the sun dies it will take the earth with it iirc so if you can wait until then you’re good
We might fix that with a bit of star lifting, disappointing sexual_tomato
Huh. I would have thought that once they break orbit that the sun’s gravity well would do the heavy
liftingpulling.If you care to learn orbital mechanics, Kerbal Space Program is a great teacher.
That one’s been sitting unplayed in my library for a very long time. I guess it’s time to give it a shot.
And if you want more complicated orbital mechanics there’s a ksp mod: Principia which adds n-body orbital mechanics over ksp’s relatively simple patched conic orbital simulation.
Imagine that you’re standing on a train and have a baseball. If you throw the ball off the train, the ball will still have momentum in the direction of the train’s movement.
If you want to throw the ball to a friend the train just passed, you have to be able to throw the ball faster than the train is moving or it will never reach them.
Now all im imagineing is a ball floating mid air and it’s beautiful
Mythbusters did this! (Well, the ball fell to the ground, but for a split second it looked like it was hovering after being shot out of a cannon.)
The vessel would still have a lot of speed after escaping earth’s orbit, so the trajectory would become a large orbit around the sun. You still have to slow down by about ~30km/s (or ~100 000 km/h) to make that orbit intercept with the sun’s surface.
“Breaking orbit” still leaves you in almost the same orbit around the sun as the earth. You need to slow down a lot to bring the periapsis of the orbit within the suns surface.
once you break out of earth orbit you are now in an orbit around rhe sun, similar to earths.
Can a solar sail be used to put a craft into the sun?
Easily. You’d just have to use it to push your orbit in the right direction at the right time. If you are like Pluto, and way out there with a very eccentric orbit, unfurling the sail as you are heading into the galaxy might make your orbit path curve through the sun itself.
That’s an interesting question. A regular sail can sail into the wind, but they have a triangular sail, and a keel with water resistance. I don’t think any of those things exist in space, so I’m going to guess no. Perhaps some sort of high efficiency propellant keel could make it possible?
My intuition would say no, but to be honest, I don’t understand the physics of either solar or watercraft sails.
As a certified small keelboat skipper, I understand watercraft sails. I think I understand solar sails, but not nearly as well. I know Stephen Hawking wanted to send a bunch of micro drones to Alpha Centauri using solar sails powered by on-board lasers. That seems like the whole fan on a boat pointed at a sail situation, which doesn’t work on earth, so maybe I don’t actually understand solar sails. I’m definitely not going to say that Stephen Motherfucking Hawking was wrong about his area of expertise.
Edit: I got really curious about this after posting and looked into it more. The project was called The Breakthrough Starshot, and I misremembered the configuration. The lasers weren’t onboard the spacecraft, they would have been earth or satellite based. So I guess I do understand how solar sails work. When photons hit the sail, they impart some of their momentum to the sail, and the attached spacecraft. Since billions of photons are hitting the sail every second, all those tiny little pushes provide forward momentum. I’m still not sure if you can use a high efficiency propellant keel to sail towards the light source or not, but I’m thinking probably “no”.
This sounds incredibly legit, but question: Could you not gain a shit ton of momentum sailing directly with the wind in a regular boat, then drop your sails and steer into the direction of it to maintain some amount of velocity for an amount of time? Feels like the same principle could be applied here, especially because they would swap between photon momentum and gravitational momentum
You can do that with a sail boat because the keel prevents lateral movement. In space if you try to turn without trust then you just spin and keep heading into the original direction. You can definitely leverage gravity wells for additional thrust in a spaceship, but that’s a whole other conversation. My idea was to try to tack into the light source with a solar sail, like you would tack into the wind with a sailboat, but use a propellant based keel to offset the lateral movement in the direction the photons are heading. But I suspect that it would be more efficient to just use the propellant as your thrust in the direction you want to go. Idk if using it as a keel is even possible. I feel like someone way smarter than me would have proposed it already if it was possible.
So you’re telling me shooting a space gun at the sun will miss?
No, just that you’ll need to use a longer casing on your round.
Launch them into Betelgeuse instead. It’s a bigger target anyway.
If we’re going for a bigger target, let’s go all out and aim for Stephenson 2-18. Go big or go home!
Sagittarius A* would like a word, and you’ll never get that word back.
I see your Sagittarius A* and raise you one TON 618.
It’s definitely harder to decay the orbit into the sun directly than it is to get to escape velocity. But to play devil’s advocate, there is probably a way to get them into the sun while being a similar cost to escape velocity. All you need to do is burn prograde to a super high aphelion, ride all the way out there to Pluto or whatever and then do a small retrograde burn to bring your perihelion inside the sun’s photosphere. When you then get back towards the sun years later you would slam into it with a sick velocity that I think would be worth the decades-long wait.
Not an expert, but I’ve read it’s easiest to use jupiter to bleed off enough velocity to fall into our sun.
Yeah it probably is, my comment was really about raw deltaV numbers without using gravity assists.
Alternatively you do like the Parker Solar Probe and do 7 Venus flybys, bleeding off a little speed each time with an inverse gravity assist.
This definitely reads like one of my KSP exploits…
Jebadiah is always so happy to spend 52 years only to find be stranded on Bop.
I actually sent a rescue mission to save one of my kerbals and the science they had on board, and ended up needing to launch a mission to save the rescue mission…
Had to break it up into three launches, two to build the larger ship in orbit and one to fuel it up.
I learned a lot about orbital mechanics that day…
Total time in space was probably about 20 years…
And I may have forgotten about a kerbals in one or two plays…
I love KSP
I scrolled down specifically looking for a KSP comment, thank you.
Gravity assist with one of the larger planets to make a very narrow orbit seems to be the most efficient way. But you need the planets to align correctly to have an efficient route.
“I’ll launch you into the sun once there is an appropriate transfer window to Jupiter” just doesn’t have the same ring to it.
I remember there was a trick where you could transfer fuel around to move your center of gravity then rotate the ship.
What if we catch a gravity assist off Jool, and do the retrograde burn at perijool to gain some free Oberth Effect DV?
This guy orbital mechanics!
Launching someone straight into the sun is very very expensive but doing a gravity assist around Jupiter or something to redirect your orbit into the sun is much cheaper.
You could always put them in a co-orbit with earth or something and then just use solar sails to provide the delta-v
But I also like the idea of certain peeps having time to understand the error of their ways before slowly falling into the sun faster and faster.
And before some one says “well, there’s still plenty of time for that with a rocket…”
Naw. We’re talking about a truly idiotic person. It’s gonna take them a while,
Wouldn’t shooting them into Jupiter be the easiest?
I’m sure I’ve read a few things about what an impact that big bugger has on trajectories in our solar system.
Intuitively I feel like a push towards Jupiter would be easier than a push to get all the way out of the solar system avoiding Jupiter.
Ummm… quick question: Isn’t that all just a matter of timing?
The only way to be sure is to try both ways in Kerbal Space Program.
Lol, is there a version for macOS?
(Please don’t don’t downvote me, I need to use Photoshop for work)
Looks like it runs on Mac.
(Better repent and switch to Gimp on Arch /J)
Exceptions do apply, things like near-immortal beings or cursed objects may require the destructive power of a Sun and no less
