alternate method of building kalphite one or simular station.

hi Dave.

Unfortunately i don't have anyway of calculating the size, but this
is not something that i came up with totally myself. I'm borrowing
things from NASA. i suspect from things that NASA wrote and things
Ive seen in books that the main sail would be something on the order
of 100 square miles or bigger. this is not as daughting as it seems.
in space you don't have to have the huge structure to hold it up,
as the wind will do most of it. nor would it have to be that heavy.
a very thin mylar sheet (1-2 millimeters thick), with reinforce
ribbing (5 to 10 millimeters) or possibly even smaller, would do the
trick. according to what I've read, most asteroids have a orbital
speed of about 14 miles a second. that means it would have to slow
down about 10 miles a second before reaching the earth. assuming that
it takes one year to slow it to that speed (it would also change the
orbit to move it inside the orbit of mercury or at least Venus where
the wind would be much stronger), it has 365.25 days, which is 8766
hours or 31,557,600 seconds. this means it has to slow it down 0.02
inches per second. unfortunately, i have not been able to find out
how much pressure the solar wind would put on the sail. lets assume a
pressure of 1/10000th of a foot pound per second.

a 100 square mile sail would have 2,787,840,000 square foot. this
would give a result of 278,784 foot pounds per second. since we are
trying to change its speed .02 inches or or 1.67 x 10^-3 feet this
results in a weight of our asteroid of 166 million pounds or 83312
tones. as i said it would be a very small asteroid. increasing the
size of the sail, or increasing the amount of time allowed, would
increase the size of the asteroid you could capture. something that
also should be kept in mind is that the pressure goes up by the
square, as the distance halves, and since Venus in half the distance
form the sun as the earth is, the pressure would be considerably
higher, and again if it were to go inside Mercury's orbit.

--- In spacesettlers@yahoogroups.com, Dave Handwerk