Steven Den Beste Strawman

Good analogy Mike that hopefully will bring some reason to this subject Shep

[mailto:spacesettlers@... On Behalf Of sraj

> In India when building houses you will frequently find a worker
> throwing bricks to another person at a higher level. When the
> brick reaches the hands of the worker at the higher level it
> has almost zero velocity. It should be possible to launch the
> raw material from the Moon at just the right velocity.

That's pretty much the idea. A payload's journey from the end of the
mass driver to the L-2 point constitutes a long climb up the gravity
well of the moon. The payload's velocity declines from a km/sec regime
to a km/hour one.

And even then, the constant impact of incoming payloads will most
certainly /not/ require a continuous countering thrust from the RCS, as
some seem to think. The vector of the impulse will be along one of the
two stable axes of the L-2 point. The impulses will push the catcher a
certain distance away from L-2, but will not make it leave. When the
impulses cease, the catcher will "spring back" to the L-2 point.

Regards,

Mike Combs