From: Spike Jones (spike66@ibm.net)
Date: Tue Feb 09 1999 - 13:56:40 MST
spike jones wrote:
> ...on the helicopter reentry systems. what if they skipped that
> part, used the weight delta to lift the entire craft into an
> orbit that will be stable for 20 years, then use the empty
> vehicles for raw materials in orbit?
to expand on my earlier post, we could perhaps build an
on orbit materials processing facility which would (somehow)
collect the spent rotons, cut them up, separate the carbon
fiber from the aluminum and lithium, store the raw materials
in a more compact form than the original empty tanks. this
could raise the ballistic coefficient sufficiently that something
like a 400 km circular orbit could be stable for a couple decades,
long enough to build something useful out of it. spike
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