Rev,
Your experiment two posts up is slightly flawed in that your trigger-man is firing bullets in succession in one direction only while spinning on his rotating platform. And your final calculation of 314 metric tons of bullets is merely a mathematical calculation of how many bullets would need to be fired given your scenario in order to obtain the desired result, so it's not really a true test of statistical probability.
A more accurate analogy might be if he were on a revolving platform with an infinite amount (or at least a whole lot of) guns pointed in all directions, and then he fired them all for a set amount of time. Using that model, a much lesser amount of bullets would need to be fired in order for one of them to hit the target. And the remainder of the bullets that missed the target would be the ones that were flung into space to create (or at least add to) the Kuiper and asteroid belts.
Rev wrote:I find that a very odd and puzzling statement. As a highly trained astronaut with a large ground crew to guide him, McDivitt would not likely have been flying by instinct. He and his ground crew would have calculated the course necessary to catch up with the object. I have to wonder. Did Brown repeat an urban myth here or could he made up the story by distorting some writer's description of what would have happened if McDivitt did what Brown said he did?
True, if McDivitt did take the time to consult his ground crew, then they would have determined that the best way to catch an object in orbit is by slowing down. But who's to say that he did consult his crew? What if the object in question was just something he wanted to take a closer look at for personal reasons, and he just decided to go ahead and take a look. Is it unreasonable to think that a man who has spent 99.9999999% of his time living on earth where it takes greater speed to catch up to something would instinctively think to speed up? I don't think so.