Space Shuttle Research Paper

348 Words2 Pages
Now wouldn’t that be a tidy solution to a big problem? Gather together all the garbage, bundle it up and fire it off into space. Maybe just dump it into the Sun. We could live in a world without trash.

There are just two problems: humans produce an enormous amount of garbage; and rocket launches are extremely expensive.

It’s been estimated that launching material on the space shuttle costs about $10,000/pound ($22,000/kg). Even if engineers could bring down prices by a factor of 10, it would still be thousands of dollars to launch the garbage into space. Let’s imagine a wonderful dream world, where launch costs could be brought down to $1,000/kg – a factor of 1/20th the cost to launch on the space shuttle.

It has also been estimated that