Is it possible to launch a supervillain directly into the sun?

It’s certainly a fun thought experiment — would it actually be possible to launch a supervillain directly into the sun like something out of a sci-fi movie (note: we are not actually proposing trying to fire anyone, criminal or otherwise, into the sun). But would it even be possible?

Michael J.I. Brown, an associate professor of astronomy at Monash University, decided to crunch the numbers to find out. According to his analysis, launching a supervillain directly into the sun isn’t as simple as loading them onto a rocket and pointing it at said star. That’s because given Earth’s velocity around the sun and the limitations of our current technology, the rocket would miss the sun by roughly 100 million km.

To overcome this, we would need to fire the rocket at 7,000 km per second or more, which is far beyond the capability of any launch technology we currently possess. According to Brown, it would be possible to launch a supervillain from Earth today in a way that would eventually cause them to hit the sun, but you can’t point the rocket right at it. Instead, you would have to launch the rocket in the opposite direction to Earth’s motion. Then, in about 10 weeks, the sun’s gravity would pull the rocket directly into it. Assuming our supervillain didn’t devise a means of escape first.