At 08:31 AM 2/5/2003 +0000, Peter Fairbrother wrote:
Thank's for the excellent explanation. I believe you may find this firm's work of particular significance http://www.tethers.com/It's a nice idea, but it needs a tensile-strength-to-mass ratio equivalent to holding a girl and her mother up by a single thread of her 10 denier stockings. Not easy to achieve. You'd need carbon nanotubes or the like, and at the moment we can't build it. You also need 45,000 km or so of tether. Expensive. Huge investment, fragile. Unrealistic, imo.Rotating tethers on the other hand can use hi-test fishing line. Really, no kidding. You only need a few hundred km, or at most a few thousand km, of tether. Cheap. There are two types, landing takeup and hypersonic takeup. They work a bit like this (here goes a try at some ascii art...)
steve
