Timeline for Why would space traders pick up and offload their goods from an orbiting platform rather than direct to the planet?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
4 events
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| Jul 31, 2022 at 18:18 | comment | added | Amadeus | @JohnDallman Some guidance propulsion is easy, my point is you don't need a fully powered flight. And you can know the weather pretty precisely. The space shuttles landed on runways without much trouble. Guided falls of heavy loads on parachutes in low wind areas should be relatively easy; human skydivers manage to land on quite small target areas. A circle with a radius of one mile is about two thousand acres, put that in a desert and we can always wait a day if the weather report means the winds are unpredictable. In a story, just presume the technology has been developed. | |
| Jul 31, 2022 at 15:36 | comment | added | Starfish Prime | @JohnDallman by the time you've got a mature space-based trading and manufacturing network, making hypersonic boost-glide vehicles should be pretty straightforward. Even quite dramatic changes in heading in the atmosphere would be possible then, so picking your landing spot shouldn't be a problem so long as the locals don't mind hypersonic re-entry vehicles bearing down on them. | |
| Jul 31, 2022 at 15:10 | comment | added | John Dallman | If you're in orbit, you need some propulsion to lower your orbit enough to intersect the atmosphere. The Apollo missions returning from the Moon came back on a trajectory that intersected the atmosphere, but needed propulsion to set that up accurately. It's also hard to make a precise landing at a predictable place, because the density of the atmosphere varies. | |
| Jul 31, 2022 at 14:37 | history | answered | Amadeus | CC BY-SA 4.0 |