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Registered Member #96
Joined: Thu Feb 09 2006, 05:37PM
Location: CI, Earth
Posts: 4061
Hi all.
Just had a thought about orbital tethers.
To build an OT from the Clarke orbit to ground would be very, very expensive and take decades due to extremely high material costs and exotics needed. So my thought is to build it from the Clarke orbit to around 100km altitude. The main advantage of this is that a modified SpaceShip One can then attach to it at apogee, then ascend the tether to orbit.
To return it would just need to descend and detach, which is substantially less hassle than a controlled re-entry and retains many of the advantages of SS1 such as its lack of thermal tiles and simpler fuel systems.
One suggestion for attaching to the tether initially would be for SS1 to have a large hybrid superconducting magnet array in an arc, as the craft approaches apogee it would energise the magnet and send a command to the tether which would energise its magnet array. This could resemble an octopus tentacle so it would not have to be as accurate as a single magnet; as long as one attached the system would work.
Even if it was 50 feet away there would then be enough magnetic flux to "pull" the tether towards the SS1 and attach.
This is based on the behaviour of magnets in a liquid environment which emulates their behaviour in space (i.e. even a tiny field can have large effects over time)
Registered Member #72
Joined: Thu Feb 09 2006, 08:29AM
Location: UK St. Albans
Posts: 1659
Check out Wikipedia, "space tether". There's a lot of thought been put into these things in the last 50 years, though the first concept of a space tower is over 100 years old.
For earth or near-earth use, they'd still need to be crafted from unobtanium (though they are working on carbon nano-tubes which have the theoretical if not practical strength). Lunar systems are trivial (for certain meanings of the word "trivial")
Designs vary from small, spinning and short (minimum cost) which would need to rendevous with a mach 13 space plane, to much longer and (apparently) stationary, so one revolution per orbit, also known as a skyhook, basically a non-landing space elevator.
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