"We are not advocates of executing people in cruel and unusual ways here on Futurism, but we have to admit we are intrigued by this astronomer's proposal of launching bad people into the Sun. Of course, as the associate professor of astronomy at Monash University Michael JI Brown explains: the concept "sounds easy enough," but "may be harder than you think." And the reasons why are fascinating - at least from a perspective of physics, rather than criminal justice."
"First, the rocket carrying our hypothetical villain deserving of a dramatic demise has to be going incredibly fast to break free of Earth's gravity - at least 11 kilometers per second, or over 25,000 miles per hour. Let's say we have a rocket capable of that, and we point it straight at the Sun - what then? "The results are, to be honest, disappointing," Brown writes in a hopefully tongue-in-cheek essay for The Conversation. "We miss the Sun by almost 100 million kilometers.""
A spacecraft launched straight toward the Sun will typically miss because Earth’s orbital motion imparts significant tangential velocity. Earth orbits the Sun at about 30 kilometers per second, so a rocket leaving Earth still carries that sideways speed and settles into an elliptical orbit rather than plunging inward. To fall into the Sun, a launch must cancel much of Earth’s orbital velocity with a massive retrograde burn, requiring delta-v on the order of tens of kilometers per second. Achieving such speeds is energetically prohibitive, making direct sunward disposal of payloads practically unfeasible.
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