[ExI] De-Orbiting Gold

Kelly Anderson kellycoinguy at gmail.com
Sun May 20 06:15:56 UTC 2012


Ok, so maybe I'm not a rocket scientist... but what would happen if
you had say a one meter diameter ball of solid gold, perhaps covered
with a three meter thick coating of copper (total 7 meters), and you
just decelerated it as much as possible and dropped it into the middle
of the Sahara Dessert. Ok, so you would have a huge hole, maybe a dead
camel, possibly a bit of a mess to clean up.. but why wouldn't
something relatively simple like that work? You make the copper thick
enough and the reentry wouldn't even heat the gold up.

This isn't the same as retrieving a sensitive satellite, it's a big
dang ball of gold... unhurt by being jostled around, crushed or even
broken apart, come on?!?

You would design the trajectory for the minimal speed of reentry as
possible, and the heating seems like it could be kept under control
somehow. What am I missing here?

-Kelly



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