I believe most satellites use thrusters fired with hypergolic fuels for adjusting their attitude (maybe that'd work with people like Bill O'Reilly too? Just aim the nozzle at his face, then open the fuel and oxidizer valves... 
), but, as it's difficult to pull a satellite up to an orbiting gas station (unless you're talking Mir, in Armaggeddon... ), sooner or later you'll run out of juice up there.
I was pondering the possibility of future energy harvesting by parking giant mirrors in our earth-moon Lagrage point that would beam sunlight back at the earth to be picked up by heat exchangers that could drive steam turbines. If you built the earth receptor stations on the planet's geographical poles, you'd always have free line-of-sight to outer space, however, the sunlight would have to pass through a thick layer of atmosphere to reach these receptor stations. So what if you had a second set of mirrors orbiting the earth in a string, beaming the power more or less straight down from above.
But, to aim mirrors across vast distances to hit small moving targets and then down to a stationary goal you'd need attitude control, and lots of it, more or less constantly. So instead of thrusters, why not a set of gyros?
I'm not an expert at these things, but I'd imagine you'd take six of em, arranged in counter-rotating pairs along the three major axises (axes? whatever...), each gyro in a pair set some distance apart from the other. You'd spin 'em up to a decent clip, and then by subtly varying their rotational speed in respect to one another, you should be able to make your satellite twist in a precise and controlled manner. And you wouldn't expend any fuel in the process, only a small amount of electricity, which should be plentiful up there. In fact, by using magnetic bearings, you could affect small speed changes just by tapping momentum through regenerative breaking from one gyro to boost the other.
Oh well. I should be in bed, but I'm not. I'm up instead, thinking about these stupid things. Hell, I should have filed a patent on this instead of posting it here since you don't need to be able to realize your idea to patent it - or even have an actual design, just a nebulous idea - I could get rich some day...probably in about 150 years at this rate of development... Bummer!
), but, as it's difficult to pull a satellite up to an orbiting gas station (unless you're talking Mir, in Armaggeddon... ), sooner or later you'll run out of juice up there.I was pondering the possibility of future energy harvesting by parking giant mirrors in our earth-moon Lagrage point that would beam sunlight back at the earth to be picked up by heat exchangers that could drive steam turbines. If you built the earth receptor stations on the planet's geographical poles, you'd always have free line-of-sight to outer space, however, the sunlight would have to pass through a thick layer of atmosphere to reach these receptor stations. So what if you had a second set of mirrors orbiting the earth in a string, beaming the power more or less straight down from above.
But, to aim mirrors across vast distances to hit small moving targets and then down to a stationary goal you'd need attitude control, and lots of it, more or less constantly. So instead of thrusters, why not a set of gyros?
I'm not an expert at these things, but I'd imagine you'd take six of em, arranged in counter-rotating pairs along the three major axises (axes? whatever...), each gyro in a pair set some distance apart from the other. You'd spin 'em up to a decent clip, and then by subtly varying their rotational speed in respect to one another, you should be able to make your satellite twist in a precise and controlled manner. And you wouldn't expend any fuel in the process, only a small amount of electricity, which should be plentiful up there. In fact, by using magnetic bearings, you could affect small speed changes just by tapping momentum through regenerative breaking from one gyro to boost the other.
Oh well. I should be in bed, but I'm not. I'm up instead, thinking about these stupid things.
Hell, I should have filed a patent on this instead of posting it here since you don't need to be able to realize your idea to patent it - or even have an actual design, just a nebulous idea - I could get rich some day...probably in about 150 years at this rate of development... Bummer!
