Reply #16: I don't think there's any 'gotta' about it - that would be incredibly expensive [View All]

[muriel_volestrangler]

Launching things into the Sun, or out of the solar system, is incredibly difficult. Since we're already in orbit round the Sun, you have to remove almost all the Earth's velocity (about 30 km/s, or 68,000 mph) to get it to drop into the Sun, rather than just end up in an elliptical orbit that comes back to the Earth's orbit. You might be able to do something sneaky with slingshot orbits, but just getting anything into Earth orbit is expensive. Look at the size of rocket they had to use to launch a small spacecraft like Voyager out of the solar system. And then there's the risk of something going wrong with the rocket before it gets out of range of the Earth.