Hell, I bet you could even find a great place with lots of space in Nevada!
If we had “nice huge cheap disposable[reliable] space barges”, we could just move all the mining, dirty-pollution-producing industry, et cetera off-planet and not worry about shipping waste out of a gravity well.
Once you have waste in orbit, it’s pretty simple to spiral it down into the Sun, either by using light pressure (solar sails) to retard its orbit, or solar-powered ion thrusters, or for that matter, just leave it in some kind of demarcated garbage orbit where it won’t bother anyone. You won’t have any significant effect from dumping waste (in any reasonable quantity) into the Sun, but there’s no particular advantage, either.
Stranger
At a cost of about $2.4 to 3.5 billion per launch.
This site says New York produces about 10[sup]7[/sup] kg of trash per day (order of magnitude). That’s about 20 million pounds. That’s 200 Saturn V launches per day. One every 7.2 minutes. At $3 billion a launch, that’s $600 billion per day.
For one person, assuming they generate trash at about the New York City average, that would cost $30 million per year to send their trash into space on a Saturn V (assuming it was being pooled with other people’s trash and we were sending up 50 tons at a time). If I start an orbital trash hauling company, would you be willing to pay the fees?
A mass driver might be more cost-effective-if big and efficient enough, it could launch things into the sun, where they’d be no tribble at all anymore. Naturally, if a set of coils failed it would have the same effect as a malfunctioning rocket.
What if we bred them to where they would just eat the garbage? Then we wouldn’t even have to launch them away.
The problem I see with a mass driver is that you need to reach well beyond escape velocity as the lump of trash will start slowing due to gravity and air resistance plus the problem of friction with the air would start it burning.
Hey!
But the second they eat enough, they reproduce. So we’d be replacing a pollution problem with a tribble problem And we don’t have Scotty, transporters, or a Klingon engine room.
But then our corner of the galaxy would look really junky and the neighbors would be mad at us for driving down property values and wouldn’t let their kids play with us. “E.T., have you been hanging out with those filthy Terrans again? I told you to stay away from them!”
Or unreasonable quantity. I don’t think it would make much difference to the Sun if you dumped an Earth mass of garbage into it. We think the Sun is going to absorb Mercury and possibly Venus when the Sun evolves into a red giant, with the only significant effect being a slight increase in the Sun’s spin.
It might be a different story if we could somehow get the Earth-sized ball of garbage into the core of the Sun (see entry 3), assuming it were made of some non-fusible material. But I don’t think anybody’s planning to do that.
It’s difficult to imagine how we could generate more than an Earth mass of garbage without seriously more technology than we have now.
Actually it takes about twice as much energy to send something to the sun as it takes to send it entirely out of the solar system.
The Earth orbits the Sun at ~30 km/sec. To escape the solar system takes a velocity of ~42km/sec. So to get to the Sun, you have to add “-30 km/sec” of velocity, while to escape the solar system, you only have to add 12 km/sec.
Current costs to dump garbage in the Puente Hills landfill in Los Angeles county, California: $38.26 per ton. Compare that to $60 million per ton to launch it into space using a Saturn V. That should answer the question of why we don’t launch garbage into space. There are other reasons, but that’s the main one.