3 ms·
> once we're up, its just a matter of force over time to create a nice orbit. It depends what you mean by "up there". ChatGpt tells me you'd free fall from
by raducu 1y ago
> once we're up, its just a matter of force over time to create a nice orbit.
It depends what you mean by "up there".
ChatGpt tells me you'd free fall from 1000 km to 100km in about 8 minutes. It also did the math that you'd need 1.65G of sideways thrust to reach orbital speed. That's quite a bit of force for spacecraft sized objects.
If you have an actual space elevator, sure, you can go to close to geosynchronous altitude and by that time you'd have enormous sideways velocity just by being dragged sideways by space elevator and indeed it would be easy to propel yourself to orbit (above a certain altitude my intuition tells me you could let go of the rope and while you'd end up on an eliptise you'd still be in orbit)
- hermitcrab 1y ago>ChatGpt tells me you'd free fall from 1000 km to 100km in about 8 minutes You trusted an LLM to do the maths when it is just s = 5t^2?
- kaonwarb 1y agoNot quite; g drops materially between 100 km and 1000 km. 8 minutes I believe is quite close, whereas 5t^2 (or even 4.9t^2) will lead to underestimating time.
- hermitcrab 1y agoThe radius of the earth is around 6300km. The difference in g at the start (between 6400km and 7400km) is 25%. But gets less as you fall. So it might make somewhere around a 10-15% difference overall? So s=5t^2 is fine unless you need a super accurate figure, in which case you need to do some calculus. I would trust an LLM with calculus even less.