Posted on 02/28/2017 3:12:42 PM PST by jazusamo
Democrat Brianna Wu claims that Moon valuable militarily because rocks ‘have power of 100s of nuclear bombs’
A transgender-issues activist and Democratic candidate for Congress says the advent of the space tourism industry could give private corporations a “frightening amount of power” to destroy the Earth with rocks because of the Moon’s military importance.
Brianna Wu, a prominent “social justice warrior” in the “Gamergate” controversy who now is running for the House seat in Massachusetts’ 8th District, suggested in a since-deleted tweet that companies could drop rocks from the Moon.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtontimes.com ...
Here you go. And this is with air resistance rather than the near vacuum of the Moon’s surface.
http://gizmodo.com/351467/navy-rail-gun-test-destroys-everything-it-touches-at-5640-mph
Meteors do it every day. A small one leveled the forest around Tunguska last century. A larger one killed off the dinosaurs. And those were random chunks of material, not solid tungsten and ceramic projectiles designed for the purpose.
Stuning newz.
I will read it.It sounds interesting.
The current slang term for orbital kinetic bombardment among sci-fi authors, fans and even scientists and engineers whose job it is to work on such things? “Dropping rocks.”
Entirely separate from the idiot’s other issues, they are absolutely correct on this matter. Not on much of anything else, but this one point they are right on.
Meteorites.... Meteors don’t hit the earth. Tunguska is speculation.
Depending on how much lift you want to allocate to getting the installation set up - solar photovoltaic and solar thermal will both work just fine, especially with a capacitor farm. Remember, solar works a lot better up there than it does down here.
You can reduce the immediate instantaneous power demand by setting a lower acceleration rate and using a longer track.
Agreed that the physics makes it possible...that is hardly the same thing as a sure thing. Having no way to correct for recently angles one could as easily be skipping off the edge of the atmosphere as inserting into it.
The escape velocity of the moon is ~5300 mph. It would take a helluva catapult to hurl even something tiny that fast, much less something with enough mass to survive the heat of falling through the earth’s atmosphere @25,000 mph and make it all the way to the ground. If that meets your definition of “very little energy,” we need to have a review of what “very little” means.
Depends on engagement angles and timing of launch. It is not always required that there be course correction to hit something the size of a city - depending on the velocity at which the projectile hits atmosphere. A simple guidance unit would work and could be built from 60s technology - you can build one even cheaper today - remember, it only has to work once on a one way trip.
Even if you can gradually get the velocity up to the 7,800 fps velocity to escape the moons gravity, it's still a huge amount of energy needed and the energy needed is the same even if you can spread out the consumption of the energy over time.
They're making a lot of estimates, since it wasn't a controlled experiment, but looking at the wiki info on the 2013 meteor in Russia, they estimate it had a mass of over 10,000 tons and had kinetic energy of 400-500 kilotons. A mass of 100 tons would be 1% of that meteor so would extrapolate to kinetic energy of 4-5 kilotons. That's 1/3 to 1/4 the energy of either the bombs we dropped on Japan. I think that Hiroshima was 15 kilotons, Nagasaki was 20.
So lets say that to equal one WW II era nuclear bomb you'd need to get over 300 tons of mass up to the lunar escape velocity of 7,800 feet per second. 300 Tons is more than 100 Chevy Suburbans.
Sunlight in space carries the energy of 1,367 watts per square meter (and photovoltaic energy capture is far from 100% efficient, so the actual energy available is much less). The infrastructure needed to capture and store the amount of energy needed to accelerate 100 SUVs up to a velocity of a mile and a half per second would be huge. Just to equal a single WW II bomb. And then you have to go back to capturing and storing sunlight again, recharging the batteries so you can take another shot. While any location on the moon spends half the time in darkness.
How much manpower and money would have to be committed to get something like that weapon installed in a hostile extra-terrestrial environment? And what would it get you? You aren't going to be able build it without somebody noticing and considering what risk it might pose. And if somebody started launching attacks against the US or Russia or China from the moon, I'd bet the response would be the total destruction of the weapon within a couple of weeks. It's a hell of a lot easier to destroy something like that than to build it. With a number of lasers synchronized we could probably knock it out from earth without even having to launch a guided missile to blow it up.
All in all, it's just a silly idea that is fun to contemplate while reading the musings of a science fiction writer, but something that will never, ever get built.
There we recent rise during both the mercury and Apollo programs that were dicey. It doesn’t take much to skip an object off.
But this is all ridiculous talk that is done when one is drunk. You can live in your sci Fi novel all you want you will fit in with those who think we are living in a computer simulation
The Chinese have announced that their planned lunar colony will include... a mass driver capable of launching payloads “into earth orbit”.
Funny thing about sci-fi novels. More than a few of them end up becoming reality.
Semantics, if it walks like a duck, and talks like a duck...
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