Practical Applications of Tethers

> This may seem a little strange, but please bear with
> me.
>
> I plan on participating in the AIAA Undergraduate
> Space Design Competition.
> This year the topic/design is for a small scale
> tether device to provide
> momentum exchange to a series of small 200 Kg class
> payloads to Mars over the
> course of 30 years. The design RPF is available at
>
> http://aiaa.org/education/UgradSpaceRFP.pdf
> To asteroza

> The underlying point of this competition is to
> design a small scale working
> tether to prove the concept operationally. This
> seems like an opening towards
> larger momentum exchange tethers, which would be
> applicable to SSI goals for
> space.
>
> I am doing preliminary work for the competition, and
> I am trying to brainstorm
> architectures that will be workable for the purposes
> of the design competition,
> but would scale well for larger applications as I
> highly suspect that most of
> the other competitors who usually take part in the
> undergraduate competitions
> will design minimal systems with little to no growth
> capability, based on their
> rather minimalist approaches used in previous
> competitions.
>
> Ideas and thoughts regarding architectures that
> support SSI goals and the
> design requirements for the competition would be
> highly appreciated, as I am
> starting to run into a brick wall in terms of growth
> capability and consumables
> use. The real problems I am looking at are tether
> repair/replacement in
> operateing multi-segment tethers with respect to
> design of the system, and the
> fact that the tether requires a fair amount of RCS
> capability that is low
> temperature as it will be in close proximity to
> temperature sensitive payloads
> (which tends to push things towards monopropellants
> and cold gas thrusters)
> which results in high fuel consumption.
>
> Ben Tripp
>
< Asteroza .Are you talking about tethering devices
that will allow you to swing from earth to other
orbits. is this same expierement that shuttle
performed when it extended a rope from pay load to
lower earth orbit. later from beachcop51503.
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