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Comment by postit | Hacker News Reader

Honest question, can I hire one of these companies to send a turd to space?

Dennis Tito went as a tourist in 2001 for $20 million. If you can get a turd generator to space for that price, I’d imagine it’s considerably cheaper to get the finished product up there. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_tourism

Referring to human beings as "turd generators" is truly fantastic.

I was going to ask a related question -- with prices as low as $50/kg, what's preventing people from launching a bunch of useless sh*t into LEO? Does someone need to approve? Or does that orbit decay so quickly that it's not much of an issue?

They won’t be launching individual turds, instead it would be a turd cluster with thousands of turds which will decay in orbit at the same time, raining an ultra-hot turd rain which will hopefully evaporate prior to reaching sea-level, instead making clouds slightly turdier.

> with prices as low as $50/kg, what's preventing people from launching a bunch of useless sh*t into LEO?

Demand. The market price for sending stuff to space will be significantly higher, pricing out _almost_ all of the useless shit.

Until Blue Origin is offering similar pricing with their New Glen rocket, I'm sure SpaceX will keep launch costs at a good premium to their costs while using this moat to make money in other areas like the SkyLink project.

At a few hundred dollars per kg, I bet you could run a business scattering people's ashes. Maybe even at a few thousand. I wonder if they would turn you down?

Edit -- turns out this is a thing, already, I just didn't know. SpaceX apparently does not mind. Flights to the moon are planned.

Had to have a recent loss to learn this, but in the funeral home's options package was to send some of the ashes to space for $2500. The director skipped over that page quickly, but it was a picture of a Falcon 9 taking off

The government of your country will need to approve, since they are covering the damage your turd could make to some other satellite.

Also, you can send the turd alone, you need to attach it to a launcher, and have a deployment mechanism. You are looking at a few thousands $ minimum regardless of the weight.

> they are covering the damage your turd could make to some other satellite

Is that by treaty?

That is exactly what I thought too. As things go cheap, they become encumbered with their local version of « turd ». We are now sending dozens of thousands of microsatellites, which, in 20 years, may well be considered as Earth’s manure floating around.

I wonder if the market or human incentives will increase some other variables which will make it just as inaccessible to the lowly (as it should - Even Elon Musk shouldn’t be able to send non-necessary stuff up in low orbit), such as: Increasing testing requirements to ensure it does ejects itself away from the LEO, or increasing legal authorizations required.

On the other hand, assuming we could indeed send our manure for $1400/kg, would it be the most reasonable way to get rid of radioactive waste? It sounds like a Simpsons episode, but the cost seems so low that it sounds like the next step.

>Increasing testing requirements to ensure it does ejects itself away from the LEO

You actually specifically want things to go to LEO before they die; when they're sufficiently low, atmospheric drag takes care of them quickly.

I agree with the overall direction of your point-that we need to be careful about our space junk-though :)

I had the exact same thought! LOL

Now I wonder what exactly about the headline made all three of wonder about sending poop to space? I guess poop is a universal answer to "most ridiculous thing that weighs under a pound"?

LEO isn't a great place for radioactive waste as it would be in the path of many satellites plus their is some orbital decay meaning it would eventually fall back to earth. Higher orbits take more energy to reach and thus are more expensive.

There is also politics involved, any country putting nuclear 'waste' in high orbits would be a suspect for putting nuclear weapons in space as well.

> On the other hand, assuming we could indeed send our manure for $1400/kg, would it be the most reasonable way to get rid of radioactive waste? It sounds like a Simpsons episode, but the cost seems so low that it sounds like the next step.

It sounds awful at first glance, but I wonder what the environmental impacts actually are of nuclear waste de orbiting and spreading evenly over the atmosphere. Normalized out per kwh, environmental radiation release might be less than the equivalent coal power plant? I'll have to break out an excel sheet later.

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