In addition to it actually being very difficult to launch things toward Venus, which others have covered well, materially reducing the amount of garbage on Earth would require an untenable launch cadence--something on the order of launching a rocket every ten seconds.

And if we could manage that we would very quickly turn Earth into Venus with all of the greenhouse gases emitted by the launches.

Pushing objects out of orbit instead of using the ship to fly to mars in days is stupid, I know. Why come up with such an idiotic idea? I must be a big old dummy.

Still a ridiculous idea. It takes far less energy to just de-orbit debris and let it burn up in Earth's atmosphere.

You're basically saying that instead of throwing your trash into the bin by your house, you should put each piece on a plane and fly it to the Australian Outback to throw out.

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No. I keep reading all these articles about these new nuclear pellet engines that are going to cut mars travel to like 5 days, fuel is very light etc… and thought this is a better first use for this technology. I’m sure that instead we will just discard the old ones in orbit and leave them. I have a thorough understanding how all this works and how much it costs. We want to explore but safety first, maybe we should clean up. Ignoring the problem is melting the ice caps right now.

Already solved. Rendezvous with Rama. Central axis docking.

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Which should be our first order of business with these new nuclear propulsion systems they want to use to explore mars. We just keep making more clutter. Eventually it will be a massive problem (like it isn’t already, it’s crazy up there)

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As in there is a serious possibility that Venus or mercury could be inhabited by a hostile species? Because anything we have ever built would be vaporized long before it reached the sun

You can't just "send something towards the sun". You need to cancel out Earth's orbital velocity which takes a massive amount of energy. It's easier to send something to Pluto than it is to send something to the sun.

If you can reach Venus then you can just as easily reach the Sun 🙄.

Why don’t we use the Sun as a dumpster? 🤔 💰💰💰💰💰💰💰💰💰💰💰💰💰💰💰💰💰💰 💰💰💰💰💰💰💰💰💰💰💰💰💰💰💰💰💰💰 and not just the cost of the fuel and equipment but also the availability of the fuel and equipment. You’re trading one limited resource (the ground which actually isn’t so limited) with another.

This is a non-starter of an idea. Might as well dump it into an active volcano 🌋 😆

So we design a “ship” for the express purpose of pushing crap out of orbit. That’s it’s whole job. They are introducing the ideas of nuclear reactor propulsion etc to head straight to mars (yet another dumpster) when we should really clean up our backyard first. It would make things much safer.

Pretty irresponsible, no? One false assumption and all life in the solar system could be gone

That explanation leaves out the part that we will never fly out to collect space junk and recycle it unless we end up in some dystopian future like depicted in The Expanse.

Almost certainly not a coincidence, but we don’t know whether the supermassive black holes are the ‘seed’ of the galaxy or whether the galaxy formed first and the stuff in the center collapsed into the black hole.

I assume you’re talking about debris that is already in space…. Well, there are many, many problems with this idea.

1. getting all the debris together, in one place, to put on a rocket would be massively difficult.

2. it’s not a matter of just aiming it towards the sun and firing a rocket. I mean, you could do it that way, but it would be massively inefficient. You would have to burn retrograde compared to earth’s orbit to lower the perihelion of your probe, so there’s no “missing Venus and hitting the sun”, if you miss your target you’re just in interplanetary space for however many years until you hit who knows what, or most likely forever.

3. getting all of this out of low earth orbit would be massively inefficient as well. It would be much, much easier to deorbit it safely into earth, aiming at oceans and/or unpopulated regions.

4. we don’t want to contaminate Venus unnecessarily.

Not wanting to contaminate a poisonous wasteland is the reason behind ideas like “scientists have lied about Venus atmosphere”. We can’t send a probe there for 60 seconds yet do not want to contaminate it.

There's a reason in every SciFi scenario all the junk winds up at LaGrange points. The energy required to move stuff around, or even locate and latch on to it, is more propellant that we've made to date.

You're logic here is based on both a lack of understanding of space travel, and seemingly a distrust of the classification of Venus as not harboring life (?) Space travel is immensely expensive, both in terms of monetary and conventional resources. Sending garbage to space, let alone another planet, would be an incredibly costly and wasteful endeavor. The reason we don't do so is as simple as that. I very much doubt that the public is being lied to about Venusian life.

That part’s irrelevant. Just send it all towards the sun, there is nothing of consequence between us.

Guy really needs to go play Kerbal Space Program RSS seriously

We will get there soon enough. If we can smack around asteroids we can clean space trash.

Good luck launching something up there to tow the junk all the way to Venus. The junk does not have its own propulsion system, and most definitely not enough to dish 4 km/s needed to leave Earth’s orbit and intercept Venus.

Why add prohibitive amount of fuel just to send the junk to some distant destination when you can just get functional satellites to, like, do controlled deorbit over uninhabited areas and let atmospheric entry destroy them.

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