Date: Tue, 03 May 2005 15:29:15 -0400
To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at WSFA.org>
From: "Mike B." <omni at omniphile.com>
Subject: [WSFA] Re: Bring a lunch for this elevator ride...
Reply-To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at WSFA.org>

At 02:57 PM 5/3/05 -0400, Steve Smith wrote:

>Yeah, it looks seriously (ahem!) optimistic.  It'd take thirteen years
>to write the environmental impact statement.

And that doesn't even count the UN issues and debates...or did we fail to
sign that "space treaty" thing a while back?

>Also, there have been a couple of experiments on the Shuttle with
>tethered satellites.  They've all failed, and from what I remember, they
>still don't know what went wrong with some of them.

Yeah, I remember one where they were going to drop a sensor pack 80 miles
down from a satelite for upper atmosphere sampling.  I think the cable reel
jammed on that one, but I don't recall the details very well.

>Biggest problem I see (outside, of course, of financing and building the
>thing) is space debris.  What happens when a chunk of explosive bolt
>left over from the Gemini Program hits your cable?  Yeah, the per- orbit
>probability is pretty small, but you're going to be doing *a lot* of orbits.

That's easy!  You just station a bunch of 8-year olds with slingshots along
the length of the cable and let them shoot the debris before it can hit!  ;-)

Protecting spacecraft is tough enough, and they don't have thousands of
miles of area to protect.  Maybe there's an opportunity for a "space junk
collector"?  A counter-orbiting set of big foam sponges should do it over
time for the little stuff (like paint chips), and the big stuff (like bolts
and gloves and old satellites) you can track with radar and maybe go
retrieve once you have cheaper access to orbit.  I think they are tracking
a few tens of thousands of objects already like that so there's plenty of
work to do for any "collection" company that wants to start
up...tether/beanstalk or not.

-- Mike B.
--
Politicians may be unpleasant, but they are... umm, never mind, bad
example...