At 01:53 AM 2/21/01 -0500, Jim Windle wrote:

I think Tim's point was simply that Sealand's location is too far north to be a good launch site.

Undoubtably, but there are also Range Safety issues.. like them pesky europeans all around...

Jim Choate wrote 2 postings: [one of them]

Sealand is an independent principality with no treaties related to rocketry with any of them. What are they going to do, attack an independent nation because a hobbyist fired off an amateur rocket?

Yes, if they wanted to. For values of "attack" that start with the local river police boat and go up to maybe a fishery protection vessel or the UK equivalent of your US coastguard cutters, perhaps a helicopter or two. I'm afraid that there isn't much evidence that the British government is reluctant to attack independent nations when they feel it in their interests to do so, nor that they consider Sealand to be in independent nation. I took the opportunity of looking over some of Ryan's interviews from last year (it's all gone quiet recently) and he's pretty clear that they are more or less relying on UK policing & protection and would be likely to co-operate if anything happens. To be honest I find myself wondering if the whole Sealand thing is a bit of a publicity stunt & HavenCo's real servers will be somewhere else - maybe not very far away - facilities in England & the Netherlands with perhaps some backup on the tower would be secure enough - these are also ideas that were discussed last year. If you are prepared to trash your computers when the local authorities move in (which was their stated intention) then you don't need a defensible fortress, still less an independent nation, just somewhere with a good view all round that is hard to sneak up on. (Anyone fancy co-location in a disused grain silo in Nebraska?)

Yep, that's how WWIII will start, you bet.

No, not WW3, more likely just a "diplomatic incident". When the Norwegians forgot to tell the Russians about a weather rocket a few years ago it didn't start WW3. In fact when the Russian EWS failed a few years before that & for a few minutes they thought there was a serious attack it didn't start WW3 - it is now pretty clear that at least a significant proportion of the command if the Russian missile forces never actually intended to obey orders. There seem to be few Russian equivalents of Dr. Strangelove, or even of Teller. (But then there are few US equivalents of Stalin or Beria, so it mostly doesn't go their way - just being sane didn't stop them being evil - whoops, I mustn't start that thread again).

Hell, by the time the radar op's figure out what's going on you're so high you're off their scopes.

Quite a lot of this stuff is in orbit these days... However small a rocket is, if it is going up hard enough to reach LEO it is going to worry any meaningful EWS. And telling how fast something is going is a lot easier from a few hundred miles away than telling how large it is, especially if you have 2 minutes to decide whether to phone the President. So when you are going to launch a small, harmless, rocket you tell any nearby governments. And when you are going to launch a small, harmless, rocket into LEO - so that it can potentially come down anywhere - you tell everybody who might have an interest. That's what those treaties are mostly about. Not mainly an evil statist plot to stop nice free-market capitalists from getting into space, more the equivalent of the rules of the road. If I turned up in your town determined to exercise my God-given right to drive on the left like a true Brit, I doubt if you would complain when the police tried to stop me. [...another one...]

The Gulf is deeper than the North Sea and I'd bet the rigs we got out here are just as big.

The North Sea ones are (mostly) built tougher, mainly because the weather is worse. We don't get hurricanes but we get continuous bad weather. So while a Gulf platform may have decent weather be OK for 360 days & then shut down and maybe evacuate for a storm warning, a North Sea platform might carry on working through weeks of 50 mph winds, drizzle, and 30-foot waves.

No, you need a boat. Sealand is more than sufficient for putting a Amateur rocket up. Hell, I could fire one from my back yard as far as that goes. Though I think the launch tower might give somebody a clue.

Yes, but you'd probably tell your neighbours first, and if you didn't you wouldn't be surprised to get a visit from men in uniform a few minutes later - if only the fire brigade, after next door gave them a call.

While the rest of you folks sit around telling yourself the same old matra, "It can't be done. It can't be done. It can't be done." We're going to do it.

It can be done. I think it will be done. But why not do it from somewhere warm and tropical and equatorial? There a places in Africa & S. America you could launch from and no-one would notice. Tell the locals it is a firework show. Put on a real firework show to keep them happy (or celebrate) and make the launch the climax. You honestly wouldn't like the weather in the North Sea. Ken