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Well I started thinking about it more. If it's orbiting at the speed of the moon, it's going slower than geostationary orbit speed. So its tendency will be to
by sathackr 7y ago
Well I started thinking about it more.
If it's orbiting at the speed of the moon, it's going slower than geostationary orbit speed. So its tendency will be to fall towards the earth. But since it's attached to the moon, this won't happen.
Not sure how much station keeping would be needed to hold this in place.
Also will have to deal with collision risks with objects in geostationary orbit. Though I don't think geostationary orbit is a particularly important factor. Could probably be a few thousand Km above geostationary orbit without any significant adjustment to their plan.
- mcv 7y agoCrossing orbits full of satellites is going to be an even bigger problem with an Earth-based elevator. LEO is much more crowded than Geo. But it would get really interesting if we were to first build this moon-based elevator, and later once the tech is good enough, also an Earth-based one. Because that one is not going to extend merely to geostationary orbit, but well past it; the center of gravity is going to be in geostationary orbit. So over a distance of 36,000 km, there will be two space elevators zipping past each other once per day.
- jacobush 7y agoThe tether is thin. The orbit is kinda wide at that altitude. It's not going to hit anything, even if you tried.
- amalcon 7y agoSurely, for this to be useful, we need to be able to hit it if we try. Agreed that anything not trying to intercept should be able to avoid that by not trying.
- jacobush 7y agoHaha touche! I meant even if you tried with the tether to swipe something. But we should be able to hit it with a rocket