(Tony Rusi) writes:

can earth based lasers and electromagnetic tethers
put the ISS in the inclination as the moon?

Lasers will be utterly useless. What makes you think they would do anything
to the ISS's orbit ???

A properly designed electrodynamic tether could change the orbital
inclination of the ISS (albeit not very effectively, as the Earth's
magnetic field has a rather weak East/West component compared to its
North/South component, so electrodynamic tethers are much more effective
at speeding up or slowing down a object in a modest-inclination orbit
than at changing its plane). However, there would be very little point
in doing so, since the plane of the ISS's orbit was chosen to make it
accessible to vehicles launched from Kennedy Spaceport and Baikonur
Cosmodrome, and lowering its inclination to match the Moon's would
make it inaccessible to anyone not launching from a facility near the
equator (i.e., no one but the ESA).

Also, there is no good reason for anything to _be_ on such an orbit,
as a vehicle with sufficient delta-vee to be capable of being launched
to or returning from the Moon can do so to/from virtually any LEO orbital
plane. (Plane changes are cheap if the apogee is in high orbit.)


-- Gordon D. Pusch

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