Comments by "Pete Venuti" (@petevenuti7355) on "Getting to Space Could Become a Lot Easier" video.
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I do not believe most of this and see this hype. Which is terrible because there are a lot of great benefits from smaller scale tethering systems, and I don't want to see those benefits ignored or curtailed because people will think space elevator in their head and automatically assume it will fail.
I propose that when it comes time to decommission the international space station, instead of letting the whole thing burn up in the atmosphere or trying to save the whole thing as a museum, it should be split in half, the two halves
connected by such a tether, and use the momentum of one half to boost the other half without the need for crazy amounts of fuel.
Heck maybe a small part can remain in the middle, the tether remaining for hooking onto satellites that need to be de-orbited on one end and satellites that need to be injected into a high orbit on the other. Basically use the act of cleaning up space debris as a source of angular momentum to save fuel!
Such an experiment would be invaluable to finding out the practical limits of such a system, and a necessary step to take tethers or even future space elevators out of the realm of science fiction.
If I remember correctly they tried a space tether once before on a space shuttle mission, and apparently it failed due to electrical charge buildup that burned the cable long before the cable would have failed from mechanical stresses....,
that's why we have to do these smaller experiments first ,.
before
we can believe the big fantasies could possibly be realized.
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