STILL OFF TOPIC: Re: America needs therapy

[Ken Brown]

Once the catcher is high enough it ought to be possible to set the
launcher so that missed catches zip round Earth & head out. After all,
at Lunar OV it "wants" to be in a high orbit.  Achieving re-entry
through Earth's atmosphere - sorry that should be "entry" it wasn't here
in the first place - needs some precision.

And if the loads are anything smaller than a large truck, they ought not
to harm Earth anyway. Just a pretty light show for anyone watching the
skies. Nothing like as fast as natural meteors.

Moon-Earth flight time could be days. As many days as you want I suppose
as long as you are going faster than the Moon's escape velocity, and
certainly very many hours.  If you do it right there is no reason it
couldn't pass the station at almost any required speed.

Catching is the hard part. A plain ordinary net might have to do, at
least at first. Well, not *that* plain or ordinary. But it needs to be
light because it comes up from Earth. You have to start small, with
pea-sized consignments. Or baked-bean-can-sized. Then you work up,
making new equipment from stuff sent from the moon. 

Anything big enough to do damage on Earth will be visible from Earth. So
it isn't at all a useful weapons launching system. If you are trying to
drop big hot rocks on cities, they will have time to run away (low tech
solution) or phone up their sub commanders and tell them to light the
blue touchpaper (high tech solution). Same goes with knobs on for nukes.

The way to get a station into higher orbits is to start even higher and
drop stuff onto it from above.

Ken Brown

David Honig wrote:
> 
> At 02:00 PM 10/2/01 +0100, Ken Brown wrote:
> >And if you can put up a bloody huge enough launcher on the moon, (use
> >solar energy or nuclear - why not - it is one place in the system that
> >we don't care about pollution) then you can send material back all the
> >way to LEO by slingshot, and when it is captured by the facility at LEO,
> 
> And Lloyds pays out when you miss the catch?
> 
> (Then again, NASA played plutonium slingshot without coverage... )