On 01 Apr 2004 23:54:25 GMT, in a place far, far away, "Jorge R.
Frank" made the phosphor on my monitor glow in
such a way as to indicate that:

(Rand Simberg) wrote in
:

I actually ran some numbers on this a few months ago. While you only
get pure plane change at the node, there are several minutes on each
side of it during which it's still pretty efficient to do it (i.e.,
the ratio of plane change to node change still remains above ninety
percent).

Thanks for the details, Rand!

I mistyped above--I meant the ratio of inclination change to node
change. Your amount of plane change is constant at any point in the
orbit, but it will be a sum of the node change and the inclination
change.

If you really want details, I can send the spreadsheet. It was
actually a pretty interesting problem.

It turns out that if you do a cross-track burn exactly at the top or
bottom, it will always increase inclination--there's no way to
decrease it. In retrospect, this makes sense, the same way that you
can only increase your inclination above your launch latitude,
regardless of whether you launch north or south. But get a little
distance away from that point, and then you start trading off node
change for inclination change (up or down), with minimal inclination
change at the top, and maximum at the nodes.