Robert J. Bradbury wrote:
> > > I wrote about the Landis Tsiolkovsky Tower design paper in JBIS.
>
> I htmlized it... See:
> http://www.aeiveos.com/~bradbury/Authors/Engineering/Landis-GA/TTTR.html
> and pointers from that. Geoffrey Landis is a very serious engineer, so...
Robert, I got to the same point Landis did in my 1993 paper. I will snail
mail you a copy if you wish, or better yet, I will scan and email it. I
derived the formula for the cross sectional area in terms of altitude, then
could not integrate, for the expression is quite complicated. I did the
same thing Landis did: numerical integration. {8-[ I used excel for
that purpose.
I wonder if anyone has managed to perform that integral and get a closed
form solution for the mass of a skyhook in terms of specific strength of
the material and the mass and rotation rate of the planet about which it
orbits. Have you heard of such a solution? That paper was shortly before
the web changed everything.
When I did my paper, I mentioned spider silk, but not diamond. I didnt
have a theoretical tensile strength of diamond. Do you have that? Also,
I think someone mentioned a isosynchronous cable on Mars. I concluded
in 1993 that it is faaar more feasible there than on Earth. spike
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