[AR] Re: The Atlantic: Elon Musk and SpaceX Want to Fly From NYC to Shanghai in 39 Minutes
- From: Henry Spencer <hspencer@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: Arocket List <arocket@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 11 Oct 2017 13:52:51 -0400 (EDT)
On Wed, 11 Oct 2017, Nels Anderson wrote:
Trying to push your way through their airspace regardless is
certainly a violation of neutrality and probably an act of war, while
orbiting overhead is neither...
Aren't entry trajectories likely to be pretty shallow, to limit G-loads
and peak heating? Seems to me there's a likelihood of flying through a
third party's *air*space at, say 300 kft, on the way to the target.
Depends on where you think the airspace ends and the spacespace :-)
begins. While there is wide acceptance of 100km as the dividing line,
it's never actually been accepted as a legal standard... the US government
being the main holdout against it. (Basically a relic of Cold War
politics -- the long-standing US position is that no single definition is
appropriate for all purposes and therefore there shouldn't be one.)
It *might* be possible for a low-ballistic-coefficient vehicle to do
almost all of its decelerating above 100km, so it would be quite close to
its destination before it drops below that line.
Henry
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