"But the airport officials were scared. They didn't know whether the destruction of the launch loop was an isolated incident of terrorist sabotage, or maybe the beginnings of a revolution-no one seemed to think, ever, that it might have been just a simple accident. It was scary, all right. There's a hell of a lot of kinetic energy stored in a Lofstrom loop, over twenty kilometers of iron ribbon, weighing about five thousand tons, moving at twelve
kilometers a second. Out of curiosity I asked Albert later and he reported that it took 3.6 x lO^8 Joules
to pump it up. And when one collapses, all those Joules come out at once, one way or another."
Comments
"But the airport officials were scared. They didn't know whether the destruction of the launch loop was an isolated incident of terrorist sabotage, or maybe the beginnings of a revolution-no one seemed to think, ever, that it might have been just a simple accident. It was scary, all right. There's a hell of a lot of kinetic energy stored in a Lofstrom loop, over twenty kilometers of iron ribbon, weighing about five thousand tons, moving at twelve kilometers a second. Out of curiosity I asked Albert later and he reported that it took 3.6 x lO^8 Joules to pump it up. And when one collapses, all those Joules come out at once, one way or another."
From Heechee Rendezvous:
http://www.amazon.com/Heechee-Rendezvous-Frederik-Pohl/dp/03...