Re: Orbital Towers.

From: Spike Jones (spike66@ibm.net)
Date: Thu Mar 02 2000 - 22:36:57 MST


> >Spike wrote: The biggest
> >real world difficulty of a skyhook is one I seldom see mentioned:
> >that planes and satellites would hit it.
> Damien Broderick wrote:
> You can twang it. Then time yr sats right. (Hairy, with thousands of the
> bastards.)

Arthur Clarke suggested exactly this in Song of Distant Earth. His
cable was in a first vibration mode, but as I realized when I read it
14 yrs ago, this scheme doesnt help much. It would get you around
the sats in equatorial, but other than that...

> >back to geo the entire structure starts to drift east.
>
> Doesn't it drift back when the elevator goes down again?

Ja but I was actually thinking of leaving stuff up there. You
can do stationkeeping by returning mass down, but that is sooo
unsatisfying. spike



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