babbler36 wrote:
> Can Settlements in High Earth Orbit (or another orbit) orbit around
> another, like Earth and the Moon, Earth and the Sun and Alpha
> Centauri A and B?
(...)

I don't know how the perturbations of the much larger masses of the
Earth and the Moon would affect the system in HEO, but in interplanetary
space it seems perfectly possible. After all, there are binary asteroids.

Lucio Coelho

I don't have the equations on hand or any URLS, but in
GEO, we frequently do fly telecom satellites in orbit
around each other. So long as they are different
frequencies (this is due to their earth footprint),
there isn't much problem.

Commsats frequently safely fly within 50 meters of
each other, though rumors are the military birds fly
closer together (there is no engineering reason reason
why you cannot fly as close as a few meters, just
safety concerns about accidents when do orbit
correction)

Ryan Z

--- Lucio de Souza Coelho wrote:

On Friday, October 31, 2003, at 09:58 PM, babbler36 wrote:

> Can Settlements in High Earth Orbit (or another orbit) orbit around
> another, like Earth and the Moon, Earth and the Sun and Alpha
> Centauri A and B?

Yes. Any orbit with access to solar energy and some way to get
materials there will do.

>
The International Space Station (ISS) most important legacy may be
jump-starting space tourism. Consider: the first space tourist, Dennis
Tito, was supposed to go to the Soviet era Mir space station. Under
pressure from NASA, Russia de-orbited the Mir which resulted in Mr.
Tito going to the ISS instead. Now the Mir was old, smelly, crowded and
probably not all that nice. The ISS was brand new, shinny, much more
roomy, etc. Mr. Tito came back to Earth with glowing accounts of how
great space is. Would his experience have been as good on Mir?

Al Globus
CSC at NASA Ames Research Center
http://www.nas.nasa.gov/~globus/home.html

Views expressed in this email are only my opinions and are not the
position of any organization I'm familiar with.