Thursday, March 22, 2007

Space Access ‘07 - Gerry Nordley on Artificial Magnetospheres

Gerry Nordley leads a double life. When working on technical issues he goes by Gerry D. Nordley. He also writes Science Fiction as G. David Nordley.

Gerry said that everyone talks about the weather, no one does anything about it. He would explore some ways of providing radiation protection.

He talked about increasing protection and creating artificial magnetospheres. There is a huge amount of literature, for example there is a Prescott paper from 1964. Gerry showed some graphs, which had a lot of information.

He said there is super conducting cables that would allow us to generate a cage around a ship so it is safe radiation.

In designing an artificial magnetosphere to protect a space craft have found that by running wires in various ways you can generate a field about the shape of a space ship. He said another approach is to build a ship which fits the shape of the field. He showed a design.

He said that a space tether can build a magneto shield. He showed a design.

Longer term we could build a magnetosphere around the moon and Mars as part of terraforming them.. We can build a pipe around the moon (or Mars) and run liquid nitrogen. You would end up with a field comparable the strength of the Earth’s field.


Gerry also is interested in tethers, he talked briefly about Tethers Unlimited. An experiment is about to be launched by Russia and will have a kilometer long tether. Tethers Unlimited has recently lost a contract which was about half of their business. They have picked up some other work, but not enough.

First: Introduction
Overview: the agenda
Previous: Barbara Thompson on Space Weather
Next: Charles Miller on the Air Force Research Lab


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