Space Elevator

"Tim Ward" wrote in message
...

I know Niven & Pournelle had something
like that in Lucifer's Hammer, but that was an effort to throw off
alien
conquerors.

The book was "Footfall", not "Lucifer's Hammer". In the fictional
account, the city of Bellingham WA was scragged by the Orion-engined
takeoff.

BTW, "Orion spacevehicle" and "aviation.homebuilt" are not a close
match. ;-)

On Sun, 27 Jun 2004 01:32:51 GMT, "Felger Carbon"
wrote:

"Tim Ward" wrote in message
...

I know Niven & Pournelle had something
like that in Lucifer's Hammer, but that was an effort to throw off
alien
conquerors.

The book was "Footfall", not "Lucifer's Hammer". In the fictional
account, the city of Bellingham WA was scragged by the Orion-engined
takeoff.

Jerry later said that, had he known what the future would bring, they
would have chosen Redmond. :-)


BTW, "Orion spacevehicle" and "aviation.homebuilt" are not a close
match. ;-)



I've seen video of a proof of concept vehicle. Esentially a large
hemispherical plate of steel, maybe 200 kilos. They had some sort of
device to load the explosives into the fireing chamber. They used
half sticks of dynamite and lofted it to over 1000 feet. Really quite
impressive, although I think RUN would be the order of the day when it
quit being a flying machine and turned into a heavy slab of metal.
--
dillon

When I was a kid, I thought the angel's name was Hark
and the horse's name was Bob.