Re: Orbital Towers.

From: Damien Broderick (d.broderick@english.unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Thu Mar 02 2000 - 21:51:22 MST


At 08:26 PM 2/03/00 -0800, Spike wrote:

>The biggest
>real world difficulty of a skyhook is one I seldom see mentioned:
>that planes and satellites would hit it.

You can twang it. Then time yr sats right. (Hairy, with thousands of the
bastards.)

>Furthermore, it isnt a free
>ride at all. When a payload is lifted, the center of mass of the
>cable is lowered, so unless you figure out a way to lift the CM
>back to geo the entire structure starts to drift east.

Doesn't it drift back when the elevator goes down again? (Assuming
processed stuff in going down as well as raw materials and tools going up.)
And could this be part of the twang?

Damien



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