Why It_s Actually Impossible to Go Up in Our Solar System
Close your eyes and imagine a spacecraft trying to leave our solar system in the one direction where there is nothing to help it. A quiet journey into why traveling "up" is nearly impossible. The solar system is a flat disk, and the planets that could provide gravitational slingshots all lie in the same plane. To go perpendicular, you would need to carry all the fuel yourself—a feat so energy-intensive that it dwarfs even the most ambitious missions [citation:1][citation:11]. Only a few probes have ever attempted it, using a massive Jupiter flyby just to change their angle [citation:5]. Let…
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