Quote:
Puke said:
Quote:
Phoenix-D said:
The Moon would disagree with you there.  Everything has an orbit, some just need to be farther out than others.
|
or faster. I wonder how fast the moon would have to be going to orbit a couple feet above the surface. and how much thrust it would have to have behind it to overcome atmospheric drag.
|
The Moon simply could
not orbit only a few feet above the surface of the earth. It's not a problem with the atmosphere. Earth's atmosphere is only about a hundred miles thick while the Moon is a couple thousand miles across. It's the simply fact of gravitational stress. There is a practical limit on how close a large satellite can be to its host without being torn apart -- broken down into smaller satellites that can handle the stress, essentially. This is called the 'Roche limit' after the scientist who calculated it.
http://www.answers.com/topic/roche-limit