July 18, 2005
Bruce Gagnon on Orbital Mechanics

In an all-day-sucker of fisking possibilities, our friend discusses a heretofore unknown aspect of orbital mechanics: shipping lanes in space:

It is clear that planning is underway to create the military infrastructure to control the pathways, or shipping lanes, on and off the planet Earth. Whoever controls and dominates these pathways in years to come has the ability to determine which countries or corporations can profit from mining the sky. This military control would also determine who militarily controls the planet Earth.
That's odd...I thought you could get to orbit from anywhere on the planet.

[via Mark Whittington]

UPDATE: Believe it or not, Mr. Gagnon seems to have won an award nomination for this bit of inadvertent humor.

Posted by T.L. James on July 18, 2005 07:11 AM

Comments

In all likelihood, he's referring (or misunderstanding) this:http://politics.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/07/12/2054216

Although I didn't read the article all the way through, I couldn't find the word "LaGrange" so I don't know how close he is to the actual topic.



Posted by: Mark at July 18, 2005 03:28 PM

Way off, I'd wager. This "space shipping lanes" notion appears again and again in his essays, with no additional elaboration on it that I have yet come across. It's not a recent thing, nor can I find any item in which he refers to Lagrange points at all. I doubt he knows what they are, so I'm less willing to give him the benefit of the doubt.

From this and other of his statements, I suspect that he conceives of space as being similar to the high seas in both structure and scale. "Shipping lanes" suggests to me a conception of travel in the space environment as a two-dimensional affair, as does his recent hyperventilation over space debris...e.g.: all that space debris is in one plane like flotsam on the ocean surface, and all spacecraft must travel in that same plane, dodging spent stages, lost fasteners, and paint chips like an old wooden whaling boat threading its way through icebergs in the North Atlantic.



Posted by: T.L. James at July 18, 2005 07:24 PM

Or maybe everything Bruce ever needed to know about space he learned from watching The Jetsons. He isn't real keen on providing references or responding to questions, so we'll probably never know.

Still, I hope he keeps chugging along.



Posted by: Aaron J at July 19, 2005 10:10 PM

And I see where he deletes whole threads when questioned too aggressively.

Tsk-tsk...bad blog etiquette.



Posted by: T.L. James at July 19, 2005 10:42 PM