I had a Fox column about this last February. Now there's an article at space.com about it.

Advantage, Transterrestrial!

Cool idea. Then we can have the Moon blasted out of orbit and careening across the galaxy, encountering a new alien civilization every week. :)

http://www.yesterdayland.com/popopedia/shows/primetime/pt1184.php

The last guy quoted is right, we would need a soft landing area on the moon for this to work. And I'm no aero engineer but it seems to me that a second stage of a sub-orbital booster wouldn't be able to get itself to the moon let alone a few hundered pounds of waste, no matter what altitude you launch it at. Maybe i just didn't read it right but I would think that you would need a booster to get it into LEO then some form of cheap electric engine (solar/plasma) to do a low delta v, high ISP accelerate and deaccelerate to do a nice soft landing. Maybe if you do it right you could make the earth/moon shuttle reusable and robtically resuppliable. I;m sure someone could do it for less then the ~60 billion that they are going to spend on Yucca.

I'd say the cheapest way would be to get the waste into low earth orbit using Sea Launch or Pegasus. Then, use a space tether to slingshot the material to the moon. A couple of cold gas maneuvering jets on the package of waste could direct its descent onto the Moon surface.

I do think its a good way to up the number of trips. Like you say, economy of scale. We wouldn't want to boost too much at once because the chance that a blowen booster would spread too much bad stuff everywhere. So If we only shoot a few pounds into space at a time then we would have to shoot a bunch of them. If you made a shot every day with 25 lbs on board (less then most deep space probes) in a nice thick stainless steel cargo holder you could put over three tons into space in a year with over 260 launches (nobody wants to work on the weekends). Does anyone know how much waste we produce in a year?
Does anyone know how to do a cost estimate on how much a system that made 250+ missions a year to the moon would cost per mission? ok so now i'm just rambling but I find the idea quite cool.
Give me $58 billion start up money, maybe 15 years and I think I could do it. :-)

If you are going to shoot into space at all, why not put it in a trajectory for the sun. Everything will be consumed, and no one will ever have to worry about contaminating the moon.

I'm with "the comment-leaver with no name" -- as a practical matter, it seems to me that annihilation is a better choice than storage. On the other hand, that doesn't get the earth-moon traffic going regularly. But which is more important?

I suggest that people read my Fox column (cited in the post) before commenting. It addresses many of the issues here.

No, putting it in the sun is the most expensive thing that you can do, and no, we don't want to annihilate it.

I wonder if the Mohole is still around? http://www.nas.edu/history/mohole/
That was a project in the 1950s to drill a hole down to the earth's mantle, or Mohovoricic Discontinuity. It only got down to some deep basalt, but maybe that hole could be put to some use.

Rand -- sorry, you're right. I hadn't considered the possibility that future generations might find a use for it, but I have an excuse: Not even "Futurama" has offered any ideas for it (compost for growing glow-in-the-dark celery?).

"From a security point of view, depositing the stuff
250,000 miles away, and in a place that no one could
visit unobserved, would make perfect sense."

This is an excerpt from a usenet discussion
of this a few years ago:

http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&frame=right&rnum=91&thl=1591412884,1591067341,1591041462,1590268321,1589961295,1589764526,1591018983,1590970759,1590789449,1590612806,1590484075,1590309695&seekm=6t9mon%24f4b%241%40nnrp1.dejanews.com#link98

Trashing up the neighborhood is not a good idea.It might make the next door neighbors mad,and we all know what happens with touchy neighbors.

The "next door neighbors"? Do you know something about indigenous life on the Moon that I don't?