darthgently Posted Tuesday at 08:03 PM Share Posted Tuesday at 08:03 PM 2 minutes ago, AckSed said: There is an alternate site centred around Australia and Antarctica in the paper. I know intuitively the forces seem titanic. RE: gyroscopic/precession forces, the author of the paper had this to say: Each carbon-fibre (not graphene, carbon-fibre) cable has an engineering safety-factor of 2, and the ring is winched off the ground, so collectively the tether system is capable of withstanding double the forces of what the rings already weigh. The assertion that, should the worst happen, the rotors are already moving at escape velocity and would either burn up in the atmosphere or fly off into space is not comforting, it's true. I still don’t see the use case. Our rockets will get better and better with increasingly massive payloads. It allows iterative improvement. That project has a few iterations until it becomes something that just has to be lived with as designed. What are the maintenance costs? How much will it cost to decommission when every part of it is at end of life? I’m just not seeing it as feasible from a budgetary and ROI perspective. It would take a multitrillionaire on a mission to do it. Any government would be foolish to attempt this using taxpayer money. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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