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To: RightWhale
He has the details if you can dig him up.

LOL!

Space cities at L5 points are a staple of hard science fiction.

51 posted on 07/18/2002 5:17:01 PM PDT by FreedomPoster
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To: FreedomPoster
'An ideal staging node'

Human exploration beyond Earth orbit also is on the mind of Robert Farquhar, a space scientist and L-point expert at the John Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, Laurel, Maryland. It was Farquhar, then working at NASA Goddard, who prodded the agency to send the International Sun-Earth Explorer 3 to an L-point in 1978.

"We can establish a human presence at the sun-Earth (L-point). We can build up infrastructure for interplanetary transportation. It's an ideal staging node to go to Mars, Earth asteroids, or even the moon," Farquhar told the American Astronautical Society in Pasadena, California, recently.

Farquhar called for the installation of a mini-space station located near an L-point. One spacecraft would take crew and cargo from low Earth orbit to the vicinity of the L-point. From there, astronauts would board a second spacecraft to the target of their choice.

"One of the first missions would be a human sortie to a near-Earth asteroid," Farquhar said. He outlined the route that should be taken and the asteroid to be visited: 1999 A010. "It would be a one-year round trip, departing (the L-point) on April 7, 2025.

"We need a whole new way to think about human exploration beyond Earth orbit. We've been to the moon ... Let's go somewhere else," Farquhar said.

Skeptics immediately called it "a bridge too Farquhar".

61 posted on 07/18/2002 5:35:03 PM PDT by PhilDragoo
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