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Originally Posted by Happy Monkey
Well, it's obviously not to the Moon, but it's well past LEO. Unless we want the orbiting end to be constantly expending fuel just to stay in the sky, it's gotta be in geostationary orbit almost 36000 miles out. And that's where the center of mass has to be- half of the weight has to be past that.
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Oh, right right right -- I sit corrected. Wasn't remembering all I could've.
Geostationary or geosychronous, you can do it either way. Synch needs a ... quite substantial hinge, and doubtless in order not to be a nuisance, only a very modest total angle of sweep -- a geo-not-quite-stationary, if you will.
This sort of thing also helps cure the geostationary satellite crowding problem, too, which is slowly getting worse: collecting the various comsat and navsat services into fewer, somewhat larger platforms gets the jobs done and clears the way for more later. This Jacob's Ladder makes one helluva cell phone antenna, no?
Btw, since when has tw any business objecting to being called a bigmouth? Is this not one of his most prominent traits, even more than his anti-Americanism? I offer the suggestion that his primary reason for down-talking a manned Lunar base is solely that Americans would be about the only people who could do it. Tw is
never happy at any prospect of American success.