Safety of a mass driver tug, or lack thereof

Charles: I hope you're right!

Ron Menich

Charles

07/14/01
03:24 PM
Please
respond to
ssi_list

>
> So, no matter how many millions of pellets we fire, this process
> remains safe, and furthermore you're quite sure of that? Doesn't

Compared with the gadzillions of natural meteoroids, it is lost in the
noise.
Go spend a few hours outside on a clear dark night away from
streelights. When there are no meteor showers you will see about 10
-15 naked eye meteors every hour. Some of them quite spectacular.
During a shower this rate can rise to a hundred or more per hour. Not
to count the meteors which are too faint to see with the naked eye.
Comets leave trails of dust and debris particles which cause meteor
showers when Earth passes through them.

A mass driver pellet cloud would be similar to a small meteor stream
left by a small comet. There are hundreds of such shower streams in
the solar system. Spacecraft pass through them all the time, usually
they do not notice them.

> that gravitational perturbations, solar wind pressure, and other

No, not solar wind pressure, that is tiny. The solar wind is a stream
of subatomic particles. Solar radiation pressure from photons is
several orders of magnitude stronger.

> effects would make the pellet orbits essentially unpredictable.

Right, they would randomly disperse over time. The particle density per
unit volume would steadily decrease. They might tend to cluster
around certain orbits in the same way meteor clouds follow comets. Not
much of a hazard.

>
> Mike Combs' reply seemed more reasonable and measured to me: Mass
> driver tugs using non-vaporizable pellets would be only a short-term
> measure until the capability to use vaporizable pellets were
> developed. At least under that scenario, the total number of
> non-vaporizable pellets would be limited.
>

Sure, if it ever becomes a problem we will have alternatives.

So let us not worry about that, and instead let us focus on developing
some markets for space development.

I would LOVE to have to deal with the problem of too much pellet debris
:-)

Right now the problem does not exist, and there is no prospect for it to
exist in the forseeable future due to a chronic lack of human activity
in space.