If you figure that out give NASA a call, they’d be real interested.
How do you anchor the end in space so that you don’t just retract the cable every time you try to use it?
CarbonatedPastaSauce@lemmy.world 1 day ago
How do you anchor the end in space so that you don’t just retract the cable every time you try to use it?
If you figure that out give NASA a call, they’d be real interested.
mech@feddit.org 1 day ago
That’s the neat thing about geostationary orbit. If the station at the upper end has enough mass, its own centrifugal force keeps it anchored in its orbit.
MotoAsh@piefed.social 23 hours ago
It’s passed geostationary orbit. Geostationary orbit is balanced, but it needs centrifugal force pulling out. So, you need to be going faster than the orbit wants, hence, further out.
UnspecificGravity@piefed.social 1 day ago
Except that you would drag it out of geostationary orbit every time you used it? Like no matter how heavy it is your still moving it closer every time you pull on the cable. You would need to constantly thrust equivalent to the mass of the cable and whatever the cable is pulling. At that point aren’t you still basically just launching shit?
mech@feddit.org 1 day ago
Think of earth as a rotating bowling ball, with a string attached, and a tennis ball attached to the other end of the string. The craft you launch is an ant walking along the string.
Its legs push against the string, but that’s nothing compared to the rotation of the bowling ball that keeps the string tight.
Technically, the ant’s climbing will slow down the rotation of the bowling ball over time, but this won’t have a noticeable effect for many millennia.
UnspecificGravity@piefed.social 1 day ago
Right, except that a bowling ball weights about 6kg and a tennis ball weighs about sixty grams, so we would only need to build a platform that weighs 1% of the total mass of earth.
bufalo1973@piefed.social 17 hours ago
The way a normal elevator works is one way to lessen the problem: the port on the top is used to launch cargo AND to receive it, so when you make the outgoing cargo rise you use the incoming cargo as the balance. 1 ton goes up, 1 ton goes down.
UnspecificGravity@piefed.social 17 hours ago
Assuming it isn’t intended to return to earth at terminal velocity the station will ALSO need to bear the mass of arresting its descent, so no, that wouldn’t do much.