Re: Towards the autonomous lifter - electrostatic voltage generators.

["Tesla list" <tesla@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Original poster: Ed Phillips <evp@xxxxxxxxxxx>

"What's more, there's practically no
gravity out there so you don't need lift in the first place!"

	Not so.  In an orbiting spacecraft there is little apparent gravity
because the gravitational acceleration is cancelled by the centrifugal
acceleration due to its orbital velocity.  For a hovering object the
acceleration due to gravity at an altitude H is equal to g * (H/Re)^2,
where Re is the earth's radius in the same units (inches, miles, light
years, etc.) as the altitude.

Ed