[Fwd: Re: starship-design: Ice Impact Terraforming]

[Steve VanDevender <stevev@efn.org>]

Curtis Manges writes:
 > Just a thought, but what if your impactors were made of something
 > like bubble gum? You could fire those in at a very shallow trajectory
 > without having to worry about losing mass as ejecta.

I'm not sure what you're thinking here, but I'm not sure you can make
anything that acts like "bubble gum" at high impact velocities.  Pretty
much any reasonable material I can imagine will be deformed and heated
to liquefaction or vaporization by high-speed impact.  And even if the
stuff you impact with is "sticky", you can't depend on the lunar surface
sticking to it; the shock wave from the impact will kick up lots of
debris.