Critique of Earth based Space Tethers

Hi Tangoman, I looked up Tethers Unlimited and saw the HiVolt system. Once you have infrastructure in space such as a cheap supply of oxygen and carbon, this may become a reality. Until then I am really wary of the cost of what is billed as a cheap lightweight structure. On the rotovators I saw a discussion on a system that was centered at GSO and spun arms through the atmosphere to pick up payloads. If this is the same system, it sounds very elegant in theory. If in fact the lower Van Allen belts could be bled of high energy protons and some sort of micrometeor protection system could be developed, then you only have to be concerned with events that overload your system and the maintenence cost. I'll stake my claim to say that this is an advance stage system instead of something we need to fiddle with in the next 40 years. There are too many things that could go wrong and zipping in and out of an atmosphere is daunting at best. If you first get lots of Oxygen and Carbon to GSO via lunar or asteroidal sources, by all means go for it and see how well it works. In the mean time the only place I am happy to see tethers is attached to spinning asteroids. I know how to get there and have a better idea of the cost and complexity. Each technology and approach has its place and I am happy to see it when applied appropriately. Cheers, Thor

> Hi Tangoman,
>
> Here is my critique of Earth based space tethers. I'll bet someone else has done a better job somewhere so treat this as the arm chair scientist version.

Thanks Thor, I'm in agreement with you, but when Charles mentioned tethers, I thought he was referring to bolos, rotovators, etc and I
happen to think they are quite feasible, so that piqued my curiousity about what your concerns would be. Think of Tethers Unlimited's designs rather than the space elevators we read so much about.

Do you have any concerns about rotavators? I'm interested :)

TangoMan