Nuke vs. SPS ( Population reduction isn't necessary for wilderness)

> You'd have a maintenance depot station in orbit somewhere that would
> house the work crews and send them out to whichever station might need
> maintenance.

I once went through the mental exercise of trying to figure out what orbit that station should be in.

It's tempting to think the station should also be in GEO (or maybe just barely below it), but for the most part the satellite needing repair would not be a close neighbor. What if the station you needed to visit was 180 degrees around in the orbit? You'd have to either drop into a lower orbit and lap your target satellite, or go up into a higher orbit, and let it lap you. Between the two, the former would be quicker. But both option would be very time-consuming.

I finally decided that LEO would actually be better (despite being so far away from the orbit of interest) because of the frequency of the launch windows to any given target in GEO. I'm thinking a launch window would open about every hundred minutes.

Other advantages of LEO over GEO would be that a manned GEO station would require radiation shielding, while the LEO one could be orbiting below the geomagnetic field. Resupply and personnel transfers between Earth and the repair station would be much easier if the station were in LEO vs GEO.

There's a fair delta-V difference between LEO and GEO, but an interorbital shuttle would be able to conserve fuel on the downward leg of the commute by being equipped with an aerobrake, and by skimming the upper atmosphere at perigee to bleed off excess velocity. That helps with the task of turning the elliptical transfer orbit to a circular low one.

But I'm only talking about periodic repair and maintenance. As for the right place for building SPS from ET materials, I agree with the High Frontier suggestion: HEO (about lunar distance), and then lowering the satellite to GEO when completed.

Regards,
Mike Combs