>why bother with an orbit at all? All you really need (for LEO at least)
>is to copy and slightly upsize RRS space shot and put a fragmentation
>warhead on the top of it

I am not an expert on this but I understand that hitting an object that
goes maybe 9km/sec is fairly hard even if you happen to be directly in
front of it and assuming it does not maneouver at all. If you will
calculate a little you will see that your fragmentation thing will be
spread out very thin very fast if you miss by just milliseconds or tens of
meters, and it gives you just one try. Ten meters off at 100km is 1:10000
precision and the miliseconds (about one milisecond for 10 meters at
9km/s) represents 1:600000 of the about 10 minute launch-to-orbit time.
iow, you better be rather good at precision. I don't think that this can
be achieved without several realtime corrections anyway so the projectile
must be actively guided.

Peter

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