Re: shuttle disaster
On Thu, Feb 06, 2003 at 12:16:13PM -0600, Ray wrote:
> On Thursday 06 February 2003 11:55, John Hasler wrote:
> > Mike M writes:
> > > Can you imagine a 100 or a 1000 of these things?
> > Yes, but why would you need that many?
>
> how many different airports do we have now? seems like 1000 would be normal
> to low.
s/airports/spaceports/ - 100 is rather a lot!
> > > Would it be possible to use them to increase the length of a day?
> > The question makes no sense.
>
> yes it would be possible to slow the rotation of the earth, but it would take
> a bit of work to do using these before it became noteable (unless you have
> your days down to 12 digits)
You'd have to fling off continental-sized masses, a few tons at a time
to avoid breaking the ribbon. The launching and landing of spacecraft
would not slow the Earth's rotation, because the momentum lost on each
launch would be returned when the spacecraft landed again.
If you really want to slow the rotation of the Earth, build some
massive tidal power barrages and put the energy to good use. Wouldn't
be much quicker though. And watch the weather...
>
> > > What would happen when the ribbon broke and came fluttering back to the
> > > planet's surface?
> > It would break at the weakest point which would be at the bottom. The
> > ribbon would not be under tension so it would pretty much just hang there
> > waiting to be repaired.
It would be under tension, because the upper station is outside the
geosynchronous orbit. So the bit above the break would fly off into
space, and the lower bit would fall back. The ribbon itself would be
very light - that website quotes 7.5kg/km - so would probably be about
as troublesome as a fall of toilet paper. Whatever load happened to be
attached to it at the time is a different matter.
That's one reason for putting it in the middle of the Pacific. If the
ribbon broke sufficiently high for the attached load to fall on a
continent, the load would be falling from sufficient altitude to burn
up before it hits the ground.
> it actually depends on how its done, most likely the tension which it would
> have would pull it away from earth (atleast the part still attached to the
> far end) and if it broke off high enough, then yes, there would be a line of
> ribbon that comes down that could cause problems.
>
> one of the many questions i can't answer is
> Why is this thead still going? and why on Debian User?
Because it has caught the interest of a lot of Debian users.
Pigeon
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