"Trip, Trap" and Orbits

Michael Andre-Driussi · 19 Apr 2002, 16:05 · from urth-v0204.mbox · original

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: Michael Andre-Driussi <mantis at siriusfiction.com>
Subject: (urth) "Trip, Trap" and Orbits
Date: Fri, 19 Apr 2002 09:05:59 -0700
Message-ID: <urth-v0204-696 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/urth/archives/v0204/696.txt.shtml
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

Adam Stephanides told the story, just in time, too, since I would have done
it in another hour or two.

The only thing I would add is that the story itself was published in Damon
Knight's ORBIT 2 (1967).  And that Gene Wolfe had said something to Damon
Knight along the lines of how that experience (being
edited/mentored/published in such company/etc.) had made him a writer (he
had a few stories published already); and Damon Knight scoffed and said
something like, "I didn't grow you from a bean."

Onto other topics: I mentioned before the notion of using "cyclers" between
Earth and Mars, and at that time I wrote that they were in Hohmann orbits.
If I said "like Hohmann orbits" that would be closer.

In any event, the notion started with a paper by Buzz Aldrin regarding
"Mars Transit System."  The cyclers (big habitats) drift in continuous,
stable orbits that cross both Earth's and Mars' orbits: the short leg is 5
months and the long leg is 10 to 21 months.

If I understand it correctly, the short leg is the trip from Earth to Mars,
and it would take at least 5 months (I've seen a figure of 6 to 8 months).
The long leg is the trip from Mars to Earth, and it would basically take a
year or two, depending.

(To reduce these travel times, the idea is to use multiple cyclers.  This
creates a sort of "conveyor belt" between Earth and Mars.)

=3Dmantis=3D

Sirius Fiction
booklets on Gene Wolfe, John Crowley
A PEACE timeline online NOW! Come see!
http://www.siriusfiction.com/

--=20

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net