-- On Wed, 21 Feb 2001 17:43:34 Jim Choate wrote:

Which is irrelevant because nobody but you, Tim, Declan, and the rest of the Peyote Pete Club was talking about anything like this.

For people that seem to be so sophisticated, it's surprising you don't understand concepts like 'amateur rocket' or 'can-sat'.

Thanks it been a long time since I even seemed sophisticated to anyone. What is not irrelevant to the discussion is, ignoring any range safety problems, is physics. Ignoring the influence of the moon, a satellite orbit is a 2 body problems which is completely specified when its initial conditions (6 scalars for things like velocity and position) are specified at a particular time. When you grind through all the math you discover an interesting condition. No launch site can directly insert a satellite into an orbit with an orbital inclination less than it latitude. (This is why we put our main launch facility in Florida, why the ESA picked Guyana and the Russian moved to Tyrutam from Pletesck and still had to use such big rockets because its still a high latitude) An orbit with 50+ degrees of inclination is not going to visible over areas like North America or Western Europe regularly enough to be of much use for a crypto system. To put it into a useful orbit an orbital! t! ransfer maneuver would be necessary, this requires an additional stage for the rocket. I am aware of the type rocket you are talking about, and launched from an equatorial area they might work, but at 52 degrees of latitude they would have to be able to launch not only the satellite but an additional stage to perform the orbital transfer. This would require not only a pretty capable rocket and a sophisticated control system as well for orbital transfer maneuvering. Even if an amateur system could do this it starts getting very expensive. Hence my contntion that Sealand, even without issues of range safety, is not a very good launch site. Jim Windle ____________________________________________________________________

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