Cities in space - Singles or clusters?

Doug,

Dont know but I would not have thought so, you could set up reasonably
large slow orbits and that should let the exhaust dissipate before it could
become a problem. This of course assumes that you are using something like
chemical rockets or cold gas (think compressed air) or perhaps steam, given
that the corrections would likely be small, you would probably use some kind
of ion drive or Vasmir in its high efficiency mode, then they would only be
a small amount of reaction mass and at high speed so it would be out of area
in seconds or minutes at the most.

Darren

From: Douglas May
Reply-To:
Date: Sat, 26 Aug 2006 11:32:49 -0500
To:
Subject: Re: [spacesettlers] Cities in space - Singles or clusters?

On Aug 26, 2006, at 11:20 AM, Darren wrote:

> I can see a lot of reaction mass being used for
> station keeping, getting the reaction mass would be easy enough but
> a cost
> you could do without.

Does there come a point where the reaction mass becomes a pollution
or collision problem? When you have all this spent propellant being
used by thousands of stations to maintain their orbits in a
relatively close area, would the smaller vessels be constantly
jostled by all the wakes left by the other craft? Would the Solar
Winds push the spent propellant to the starward side of the cluster,
making your time in orbit on that side more perilous?

just curious.

doug