Re: Blue Balls vs Red Balls
Doug - did you miss my post above?
There is no concept of building balloons on earth and floating them there for any reason; the only reason to make a balloon is to make it easy to move megaton chunks of processed metals around once you've got them here.
And yes, I know they have to come down (speed up, I think?) from an asteroids orbital velocity to Earth's - that's why I'm thinking about aero-braking. There's no sane way of decelerating it chemically, though if you don't care too much about timescale then a solar sail approach might be helpful. I dunno - I build catflaps, not missiles (except on the SPB :)
The idea I think I stole from an SF writer whose name I forget; he parked one over Washington DC to focus the minds of the lawmakers...
Biting the hand that feeds IT
