Somewhere between Earth and the Moon, at any given moment, there is a point where the gravitational pull of the two cancels out. If you were to put an object with mass there, say a marble, then the marble would not move in either direction. Mostly out of a deep-seated narcissism, but partly out of a desire to avoid referring to “the point” repeatedly, I’ll refer to this point as a K-spot.
When I first learned about gravity, I began to wonder about the existence of K-spots, and the many useful applications there are for such a spot. The greatest of the many applications I conceived of I like to call the K-Ladder. Let me explain.
Imagine we, as a race of civilized beings, created a ladder that was long enough to reach from the Earth to the Moon. Further imagine that we constructed the ladder so that its center of mass could be placed exactly at the K-spot while it bridged the gap between the Moon and Earth. Theoretically, it would hang there, and we could climb a ladder 380,000 km in length, all the way to the Moon.
One might object that this seems cost-inefficient, but I ask you in what universe is a simple step ladder more expensive than, say, thousands of gallons of propellant for an enormous spacecraft as well as the delicate and intricate electronics systems throughout said craft?
No, the K-Ladder requires only enough wood (or metal (or rope)) to be 380,000 km long, and just enough fuel to lift one end to the Moon and accelerate the entire ladder in the proper direction so that the ladder travels in a stable orbit that is ever centered at the K-spot.
A first problem with the K-spot as described above is that it moves: since the Moon is revolving around the Earth, the K-spot between them is also moving around the Earth. Furthermore, the K-spot shifts when the Moon is between the Sun and the Earth, as opposed to when the Moon is opposite the Earth from the Sun. So there’d be like, you know, *math* involved. It’ll create jobs.
At $1,260 per 5,000 ft wire coil, we’d need 249,344 coils costing $314,173,440 total. Incuding the 249,343 Crosby G-450 connecting clips that we’d need to clip each coil together (at $3.02 per unit) brings the total cost to $314,926,456. Ignoring for the moment that the break strength of these coils is 2,000 pounds and that the proposed K-rope would weigh in the ballpark of 50,000,000 pounds, this far underbids NASA’s entire shuttle program which cost $209 billion (by 2012 inflation standards) with a per-flight cost of $1.6 billion.
Even generously over-estimating the cost of labor involved in attaching the 249,344 coils together at $2,000,000 and including the one-time cost for launching the K-rope into position (let’s high-ball it at $100,000,000), our total final cost is still well under $500,000,000. This is less than .25% of the entire NASA shuttle program, and less than a third of the cost of a single shuttle flight.
And the K-ladder/rope is reusable, meaning we’re good to go until our ladder-to-the-Moon rusts away.
OH WAIT. DID I MENTION WE PAID FOR GALVANIZED WIRE?
- K
Blirector’s Cut Bonus Footage: The Making of “K Replaces NASA”:
[Please tell me this ends with some joke about how it's hard but rewarding to find the K-Spot. Like "so hard have they tried to find it without avail that many scientists doubt the existence of the K-Spot." - W] <<<I suppose that I shouldn’t call it a K-spot if I’m not going to make a G-spot joke, right? Like Chekhov’s gun. – K>>> [[["Chekhov's gun" being the name for the way you have to kind of make your hand into a hook shape to find the G-Spot. 'Cause it's like when you're playing Cops and Robbers and you make your hand look like a gun, only crooked. This guy knows what I'm talking about.]]]