response 1 of 8:

Sep 25 16:09 UTC 1998

Is anybody working on flingers--some device to accelerate packages to 
orbital speed and toss them into orbit from the ground?  

response 3 of 8:

Oct 3 20:16 UTC 1998

there's no doubt that the asteroid danger is far from insignficant. All this
time we have been sitting unawares of what might come down from above all of
a sudden. Now, I'm from india so i don't really have much info about Congress
decisiions and all that stuff. What i feel is that we tend to underestimate
amateur astronomers a bit too much. A proper, concerted amateur programme
aimed toward finding NEA (Near Earth Asteroids) should be pretty useful in
maintaining a tally of these space critters, as well well as searching for
new ones.. The really dangerous asteroids, ones with radii approx. 5 km. +,
can be easily spotted by amateur scopes, if in NEA orbit, and amateurs
obvously have more time and energy than the professionals. besides , the cost
fo the whole project would come down too. What do you guys have to say?

response 5 of 8:

Oct 3 23:27 UTC 1998

Re #0:  There is a big amateur effort to find near-earth asteroids.
I seem to recall that several new ones are found each month.  If
one (or several) are found heading for Earth, maybe the pols will
spend some money.  They'd want to claim credit for saving us, right?
 
Re #2:  That's the "propellant-free" model (which uses air, as long
as there is enough air).  There have also been designs which use ice
as the propellant, and vaporize a thin layer off the back of a lens-
shaped slab with each laser shot.  The expanding steam shoves the
rest of the package along.  Payload to orbit would be a few kilograms,
but for the investment in the laser and mirrors it could fling those
kilos into orbit every few minutes all day and all night.  Where a
Shuttle is a panel truck to space, this would be a skinny pipeline.
Over time, it would move a lot more than Shuttle and for lots less.
 
I suppose if you need to get food and propellant up to the astronauts
who are going to go to the Orion ship in its highly-elliptical orbit
(so you don't have to fire any bombs near Earth), it becomes attractive.
Unless someone can use the capacity of the pipeline, it's not.
 
Maybe this discussion needs its own item, and leave this one for NEAs.

response 7 of 8:

Apr 28 15:42 UTC 1999

Rather than have a lot of money pumped into a (relatively) few expensive
government run sites to find NEA, why not set out a program that would
involve all the institutions across the globe having telescope
facilities
 
a) investing a part of viewing time to actively search for NEAs
b) run additional checks for NEAs on photos taken during regular
operation 

Then the relevant coordinates, sizes etc. could be e-mailed to a central
facility that automatically sorts out this and plots it on a chart or
something as a tentative NEA and tries to cross check it from other
reports. There are lots of details of course, but why not distributed
processing employing existing hardware instead of splurging on new
hardware ?