“Close, but still a pretty big dogleg,” Simberg said. While touting his ELEO vision, Simberg noted the current absence of equatorial launch sites across the globe-with the exception of the European Spaceport located in Kourou, French Guiana, just 500 km (312 mi.) north of the equator. It would open up the space frontier in the same way the transcontinental railroad opened up the West.” But think of it as a mass pipeline to space. “You can think of it as a traditional launch rate with a payload on a rocket. “Basically, what we are talking about is if you have regularly scheduled flights every day into ELEO, you could do that because there are no launch windows,” Simberg said. Other benefits include an option for concentrating as much space activity as possible in a single orbit plane with low relative velocities to simplify space traffic management relying on the low altitude that could facilitate the disposal of space debris at a faster pace easier planning for missions to cislunar space and beyond posing lower risk to populated land masses when launching nuclear reactors for deep-space mission propulsion and minimizing pollution in the upper atmosphere. Once in ELEO, they could hook up with “harbor tugs” to continue their journeys to geosynchronous destinations, or turn to an electric propulsion source to reach higher altitude or an ELEO laser for light sail propulsion to higher-inclination orbits. The potential benefits of ELEO include taking full propulsive advantage of the Earth’s rotation for space launches, eliminating launch window constraints governed by specific orbital inclination mission destinations and placing payloads in ELEO. “What I’m proposing is pretty radical even for me,” Rand Simberg, president of Interglobal Media, LLC, told the FISO audience in a webinar entitled, “Equatorial Low Earth Orbit (ELEO): Earth’s Natural Harbor.” Low-altitude equatorial orbits could be a first or final step in carrying out missions for uses including national security, solar power generation, human space resorts, dry docks for assembling large space assets, or even staging space lasers as light sail propulsion sources. 15 Future In Space Operations (FISO) webinar. The future of access to space may lie with equatorial launch sites that could make launch windows a thing of the past, according to a Feb.
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