[ExI] De-Orbiting Gold

[Adrian Tymes]

Nothing.

What the common analyses miss is that this sort of thing is
even possible, let alone practical.  They think the deceleration
must follow the same rules as every previous deceleration -
which means launching specially designed hardware up, in
order to bring this down.

They may argue about how you're going to decelerate this -
ignoring that, since it's roughly shaped metal anyway,
lasers could do the trick.

On Sat, May 19, 2012 at 11:15 PM, Kelly Anderson <kellycoinguy at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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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