2 ms·
That's probably a reasonable conclusion. It does happen to be totally overshadowed by my bigger mistake, which is an order of magnitude. Repeating the calculati
by kamray23 5y ago
That's probably a reasonable conclusion. It does happen to be totally overshadowed by my bigger mistake, which is an order of magnitude. Repeating the calculations using my physics CAS today:
Starship mass: 1.3·10³ kg
Starship weight: 1.3·10⁷ Newtons
Converting that into something reasonable, it's 13 MN, not 1.3. A Kevlar fibre cable will be 22 tonnes, a PE one 9000 tonnes, and a carbon one 2200 tonnes. I wouldn't like to even imagine steel. And these are just with a breaking strength of 13 MN.
Not the most reasonable, though obviously we've held up things like Arecibo in the past. Using multiple smaller cables would be the optimal solution and what we would go with, since a single cable is >1 meter in diameter in any case. The mass doesn't get any smaller like that, though, so it's not a consideration we'd need to make.