Like [1]. But for an "oh, that's cute", here's [2] Launching mass from the Moon helped by lunar gravity anomalies (2024). The Moon's gravity field has lumps (mascons), so low lunar orbits are unstable (increasingly elliptical until ground impact; timescale months; thus satellites requiring powered stationkeeping even with no atmosphere). Paper observes you can run the path in reverse: elliptical ground launch gets somewhat circularized. So for some locations and trajectories, a passive object (no circularization burn) can stay up for days, instead of the hours of a once around and splat. Making for an easier hypothetical catch. Tnx for the muroid runway!
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Like [1]. But for an "oh, that's cute", here's [2] Launching mass from the Moon helped by lunar gravity anomalies (2024). The Moon's gravity field has lumps (mascons), so low lunar orbits are unstable (increasingly elliptical until ground impact; timescale months; thus satellites requiring powered stationkeeping even with no atmosphere). Paper observes you can run the path in reverse: elliptical ground launch gets somewhat circularized. So for some locations and trajectories, a passive object (no circularization burn) can stay up for days, instead of the hours of a once around and splat. Making for an easier hypothetical catch. Tnx for the muroid runway!
[1] https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C33&q=+An... [2] https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.09616