Leon lcb11211@swbelldotnet wrote in
:

On 6/10/2013 2:02 AM, wrote:
On Sun, 09 Jun 2013 21:09:07 -0500, Leon wrote:

You uh believe that sending it towards the Sun is going to be a problem?

Only a financial one and maybe a technical one. Obviously, the sun
would make a great trash burner, but it's something often discussed
but not acted on ~ yet. There must be some practical reasons for that
otherwise I'm guessing it would have been done already.



Substitute political for practical in your last sentence above and you
have your answer.

Actually, there is a practical reason for not doing so: it takes too much fuel. To eject
something from the solar system completely, you need to speed it up only a little bit, but to
make it fall into the sun, you have to slow it down A LOT. (I used to work with a guy who was
a for-real rocket scientist -- former NASA aerospace engineer -- and once asked him
exactly the same question: why don't we dispose of nuclear waste by launching it into the
sun? and that was his answer.)