Quote:
Originally Posted by Rick Lee
I saw a show on tv the other day that predicted we will one day use a cable/tether that anchors the space station to the Earth and is kept tight by the centripetal force and then we can use it like an elevator to send supplies up there.
|
The only way the "bean stalk" works, is to have the anchor in Geo-Sync orbit. Can you imagine a cable that is connected from the earth, up to a sat, that is 32,000 miles long?
And for the orbit not to very with changes in mass, the mass in orbit needs to be very very large. Asteroid large.
Our manned space program is a joke. We have not been out farther than 1000 miles in orbit, since 1972. We should have put the space station in Geo-Sync, or maybe L4 or L5. The Space shuttle is a joke. A bad joke. We need a system to move people to low earth orbit. Everything else should be unmanned. Why pay to shove a shuttle into orbit, which carries a payload that is a fraction of the weight of the shuttle?
Early in the shuttle program, there was short lived program to take an external tank, make it a payload unit, attach a set of shuttle engines to it, external tank, SRBs. It would deliver to orbit weight equal to the shuttle. We need a "mini" shuttle, for people only. Everything else should be on non-reusable equipment. Eventually, we need to get catapults going, which can throw small items into orbit.