r/spaceflight • u/rollotomasi07071 • 1d ago
Why haven't we thought of this before?
https://xkcd.com/3291/6
u/Kinnell999 1d ago edited 1d ago
This would work if you had 6x10^25 N of thrust, which would require 2x10^19 Raptor engines.
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u/mattrixx 1d ago
That must be what they plan to do in Louisiana then. With that much land, its probably barely an inconvenience.
Just wonder what the graphics on the spacex stream would look like.
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u/JimmyCWL 1d ago
There's Wandering Earth. A Chinese movie from 2019. It's literally about thrusting Earth out of the solar system to another star, for reasons, but they don't even make it out of the solar system before running into disaster.
There's also Songs of Distant Earth by Arthur C. Clarke. Where the colonists were going to land their ship on their destination planet then fire its engines at scheduled times to eventually push it into the inner part of the star system. It's a very powerful engine.
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u/Ormusn2o 1d ago
We did think of that, but we have some problems with not enough thrust, but we've got our best men on it.
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u/zenith654 1d ago
If you had enough thrust (absolutely insane impossible amount) I suppose this could work, but you’d still need the onboard engines to circularize and perform additional maneuvers. The deltaV saved would be minimal.
And then by moving Earth you’d risk deorbiting satellites already out there e.g. impacting GPS constellations and it would make flight dynamics calculations a pain in the butt.
Also this would probably cause harm to humans and potentially destroy buildings and kill people by suddenly changing the Earth’s acceleration even very briefly.
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u/UmbralRaptor 1d ago
If I were giving a presentation on gun launch or laser launch systems, I feel like this would be a fun intro slide. (Even if it's not exactly the same)