From: "Douglas R. Floyd" <dfloyd@io.com>
Date: Sun, 18 Aug 1996 18:48:02 +0800
To: jimbell@pacifier.com (jim bell)
Subject: Re: Orbiting Datahavens
In-Reply-To: <199608180358.UAA29680@mail.pacifier.com>
Message-ID: <199608180736.CAA08078@xanadu.io.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


> 
> At 06:32 PM 8/17/96 -0500, snow wrote:
> 
> >
> >     It is just as easy to take out a satelite in LOE as it is to sink an
> >oil rig, plus swapping defective Hard Drives is a real bitch.
> 
> Hard drives don't work in a vacuum, at least conventional ones don't.  (And 
> I'm not aware of any hard drives which are designed to be permanently 
> pressurized against a hard vacuum, either...)

Also, the corona effect is a real bear too.  Hard drives wouldn't be able
to have the little bit of air the heads float on, and contact at 3600/7200
rpm is not good for the drives.

Then you get hard radiation that plays hob with the circutry.

Even if nobody attacked the LOE satellite, there is always space debris.

> 
> Jim Bell
> jimbell@pacifier.com
>