You'd think a giant mass like that might have some helpful gravity, but we're all in a stable orbit with a strong angular momentum.

Throw them backwards really hard.

Can we compromise by strapping them to the launch pad directly underneath the rocket before it's ignited?

Ok, JFK, calm down.

Orbital speeds. Remember earth and by consequence everything on it is moving at 30km/s. Most efficient way to hit the sun is to cancel that out, or decelerating until your velocity relative to the sun is 0 and then gravity does the rest of the work. Orbiting a stellar object is missing with flair. It’s easier to entirely miss the sun by accelerating at roughly 12 Km/s additional velocity which will allow you to escape the sun’s gravity. Or 40% of the delta V (more velocity is not linear fuel expended either, more exponential with needing roughly 99x more fuel to do one than the other… not even accounting for the chase of now accelerating that fuel weight.)

The earth is moving rapidly around the sun, so anything we launch is already orbiting the sun. To hit the sun you then have to counteract all that momentum. To escape the solar system you just have to add a bit more speed to what we already have. Though both take a lot of energy.

Just download Kerbal Space Program and it'll all become clear. It's a blast and accidentally teaching you orbital mechanics.

Right now you are flying, together with earth more or less the speed you need to stay orbiting the sun forever.

Add a "little" speed and you fly away

We’re technically falling towards the Sun.

We don’t hit it, because we’re also moving around it at a crazy speed.

So even though we’re falling, we permanently miss it. If that makes sense.

The change in speed (deceleration) it would take to slow us down enough that we fall directly towards and into the Sun… is greater than the change in speed required to go fast enough to fly away from it.

So, you need energy to either change your velocity by 30km/s, or by 12km/s.

Hence, easier to speed up a ‘little bit’ more.

A soccer player needs to either score a goal, which would be hitting the sun. Or they need to knock it out of bounds, which would be sending out of the solar system.

Both require power to drive the vehicle, but only one needs accuracy.

This is the part I don't understand apparently. Wouldn't it be pretty easy for the thing so giant that it causes other giant things to circle it suck up a tiny person relatively easily?

You can have your cake and eat it. Launch them into a different sun, we can create a congo line of frozen corpses, on their way to Alpha Centauri. Although it might weird any aliens out that might come across it.

I'd be satisfied with a sub-orbital parabola in the general direction of *gestures at sky*

Someone on the other end might need a mop but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Even more environmentally friendly, use a geopolymer cement that doesn't use a quicklime reaction that requires heat to produce.

Yeah. Check out the path they launched the Parker Solar Probe on. That wasn't into the Sun, but it was as close as anything we've ever sent up.

No idea if this has any real world application, but Kerbal Space Program taught me that launching outwards to a huge planet (Jupiter), one can get a reverse gravity assist to get an extremely narrow ellptical orbit. Then you just need a light retrograde thrust at the apoapsis, and your orbit will intersect with the sun

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbital_mechanics

Looks like the source is a screenshot from a microblog. Hope that helps 🤗

https://imgur.com/delta-v-map-of-solar-system-SqdzxzF

Source? It's not exactly brain surgery...