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Huge 'Launch Ring' To Fling Satellites Into Orbit
New Scientist ^
| 10-3-2006
| David Shiga
Posted on 10/03/2006 2:51:24 PM PDT by blam
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To: r9etb
"And don't forget the part about screaming through the atmosphere at Mach 20+. The thermal requirements are gonna be killer. " I've read a plan where they planed to do this up the side of K2 getting it out of a good percent of the atmosphere (over 28K feet) before it's released. The plan was more elaborate though involving high energy ground based lasers tracking it and flashing H2O to supercritical steam thus providing thrust in addition to its initial kinetic energy. This was push mass in to Lagrangian points not just LEO.
There's not much development around K2 so no one would be bothered by the shock-wave.
Because you're not as concerned with the mass of the projectile you could surround the satellite by some sort of heavy sabot to protect it in atmospheric flight.
The problem I have with this is, do we really want all this stuff up in orbit? There's enough junk up there as it is.
61
posted on
10/04/2006 8:20:31 AM PDT
by
avg_freeper
(Gunga galunga. Gunga, gunga galunga)
To: ryan71
This is a gun. It would be more practical to design projectiles that could be launched into space and put into orbit until needed.Exactly. It's a vastly overdesigned, overpriced gun. Saddam's 'supergun' would have done the same thing at probably 1% of the cost. Gerald Bull, the designer of the supergun, had wanted to do just this; build a cannon for sattelite launch.
If the specs for the sattelite call for it to handle 1300g, blasting it out of a big ol' cannon would be entirely reasonable.
To: MikefromOhio
I thought that looked like Uncle Jun too.
63
posted on
10/04/2006 8:34:47 AM PDT
by
ichabod1
(Political Correctness is communist propaganda writ small.)
To: xsmommy
Didn't want you to miss your boyfriend ping
To: Hegewisch Dupa
which boyfriend are we talking about here?
65
posted on
10/04/2006 8:40:19 AM PDT
by
xsmommy
To: blam
Air resistance is the major problem. First it will bleed energy off the projectile, and second it will cause extreme aerodynamic heating. A solution would be a hollow tube reaching at least five miles high that could hold a vacuum, ten miles even better. The tube could be built along the side of a mountain, but it would have to go even higher than any mountain. This project is somewhat similar to the space elevator as far as technology.
66
posted on
10/04/2006 8:41:47 AM PDT
by
RightWhale
(Repeal the law of the excluded middle)
To: xsmommy
Good point - it be a long list. I meant the one pictured in the post my ping references (#4).
To: Hegewisch Dupa
68
posted on
10/04/2006 8:46:08 AM PDT
by
xsmommy
To: xsmommy
Dang - you sure do wear them out. No wonder you likem the young 'uns...
To: avg_freeper
There's enough junk up there as it is. Right. But it is the wrong junk. It is somebody else's junk.
70
posted on
10/04/2006 8:49:20 AM PDT
by
RightWhale
(Repeal the law of the excluded middle)
To: Hegewisch Dupa
well i am no debra lefevre!~
71
posted on
10/04/2006 9:03:04 AM PDT
by
xsmommy
To: Centurion2000
IMPORTANT SAFETY TIP: DO NOT CROSS THE BEAMS!
72
posted on
10/04/2006 10:08:32 AM PDT
by
Erasmus
(I invited Benoit Mandelbrot to the Shoreline Grill, but he never got there.)
To: 31M20RedDevil
Niven used this launch system in Ringworld,or was it for landingHe described the rings as being for decelerating a ship returning to the Ringworld. For those who don't know, the Ringworld is a ring 93 million miles in radius - one Earth orbit - which would make it 600 million miles long. It started with the mass of a Jupiter sized planet, and it's a million miles wide, about a thousand meters thick. It has three million times the surface area of the Earth. It was built by my species (literary spoiler reference to my screen name).
More precisely the rings would actually have been for accelerating or decelerating any returning space ship, as needed, to match the Ringworld spin rate (770 miles/second). The ship would then just maneuver over to a landing platform once it's matched the spin rate. For "launching" the ship, already traveling at the Ringworld spin velocity while sitting on the platform, would just be "dropped" through a trap door, ala one of these satellites being flung into space and float away at roughly 1 gravity.
The superconducting rings were made from scavanged parts of the original designs steering jets, needed to keep the ring stable with it's star at the center of it's spin. The Ringworld inhabitants who built the system didn't realize that they were endangering the entire Ringworld when they stole the parts for their system and for their Bussard Ramjet space ships, which also used the superconductors. That stuff gets covered in Ringworld Engineers, Ringworld Throne and Ringworld's Children. He also talks about the engineering of Ringworld in a neat essay, Bigger Than Worlds.
Can you tell I'm a bit obssessed? <g>
73
posted on
10/04/2006 10:39:02 AM PDT
by
Phsstpok
(Often wrong, but never in doubt)
To: Erasmus
IMPORTANT SAFETY TIP: DO NOT CROSS THE BEAMS! Thanks Egon ....
74
posted on
10/04/2006 11:28:19 AM PDT
by
Centurion2000
("Be polite and courteous, but have a plan to KILL everybody you meet.")
To: Phsstpok
Protectors were some bad dudes alright,Puppeteers
were terified of them.
That Ringworld is a stunning conception and
creation.Not to mention the sunflowers,floating cities etc
No,protectors didn`t create sunflowers did they?
You mentioned an essay Niven wrote, "Bigger than worlds"
If you would,where do you find it? I can`t locate it.
Thanks
To: 31M20RedDevil
Bigger than worlds is in a couple of his collections, first in 1974s A Hole In Space and then in one of the more recent mega collections of his stuff Playgrounds of the Mind. It was originally published in Analog in 1974.
76
posted on
10/04/2006 1:15:59 PM PDT
by
Phsstpok
(Often wrong, but never in doubt)
To: taxcontrol
Perhaps orbits are overrated. How high could a craft eventually go if it could always maintain a propulsion force of 9.82m/ss?!
77
posted on
10/04/2006 1:21:41 PM PDT
by
Southack
(Media Bias means that Castro won't be punished for Cuban war crimes against Black Angolans in Africa)
To: 31M20RedDevil
Protectors were actually afraid of Puppeteers, as well. They knew that they could pose threat to their species and, given the chance, would have wiped them out. That factored into
Ringworld Throne to a significant degree. That was part of what the "Brennan Monster" was doing in fighting the Protectors. He didn't want anything to happen to Humans, but he saw other species as potentially beneficial to man, too. They didn't know about any other species yet (Phssthpok was the first alien they'd encountered as of the novel
Protector) but once Brennan was changed he would have been able to reason out the existence of other species.
My favorite thing about the Ringworld books is probably the true story where Niven explained why he wrote the second book,
Ringworld Engineers. He got emails from all over picking at the engineering of his original concept, including one from Freeman Dyson himself! He also tells the story of being at a convention in Boston and having an entire engineering class from MIT start chanting during his speech "the Ringworld is unstable" over and over. They'd done a semester examining the whole thing. He had to incorporate all of this into the second novel to fix the things he'd overlooked in the first one. That's where the attitude jets came from, for example.
Stories like that are why I enjoy the mega collections of Niven's stuff, the one with the essay "Bigger than Worlds,"
Playgrounds of the Mind, and the other one,
N-Space. They contain some short stories, some excerpts from the big novels, some essays (including Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex) but also lots of little stories. The one about "Speaker to Seafood" is a riot.
I met Larry Niven at a SF convention several years ago and spent the whole weekend with him and Jerry Pournelle in the hospitality suite getting drunk. Pournelle and I knew each other from years of attending the same computer conventions, so he let me into the inner circle, even though it was my first SF con. Very fun people. I even got to discuss with him some flaws I saw in the back story for
Protector, where his supposed biological link just doesn't stand up to what we know now scientifically about our species and other species on Earth. I provided him an alternative biological explanation for the similarities between humans and Protectors, that even added in a connection back to the Slaver/Tnuctip galaxy wide war he alludes to in his other Known Space stories. To explain why the "wrong" version of the story was in the book
Protector I told him he could simply say that Brennan, the only source of the info in the novel, had lied to protect humans from knowing the truth, which would mess with their natural development. He's never used it, but he told me he liked it.
Oh, and the Tnuctip created the sunflowers for their masters, the Slavers. The Tnuctip were master genetic engineers whom the Slavers controlled with their mental powers, that is until the Tnuctip rebelled and the Slavers wiped out all intelligent life everywhere in the galaxy, including themselves, by unleashing their super weapon. That was several billion years ago, however. We came along later.
78
posted on
10/04/2006 1:35:52 PM PDT
by
Phsstpok
(Often wrong, but never in doubt)
To: Fudd
Figured that in your head, didn't you? :-)
To: blam
You'll definitely need one of these to ride that thing:
-PJ
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