> I doubt you can even hit a target directly under you from a satellite in geosynchronous orbit, at least without a fairly significant amount of effort. > You

> I doubt you can even hit a target directly under you from a satellite in geosynchronous orbit, at least without a fairly significant amount of effort. > You can't just fire a rocket "straight down" -- if you just point at the Earth and thrust, you end up in an elongated orbit that misses the earth entirely. The second sentence doesn't justify the first. You can thrust in various directions even if your intended trajectory is straight down. I surmise you would simply need to reduce orbit speed to maintain the same angular velocity the whole way down, which doesn't strike me as a computationally or physically difficult problem.