Spike Jones wrote:
>
> EvMick@aol.com wrote:
>
> > I don't recall either one "lifting the cable with a space ship"....
>
> OK I got off my lazy ass and looked it up. Turns out Clarke was
> a little ambiguous. See what you think. Clarke, Chapter 26, Snowflake
> Rising, from Songs of Distant Earth:
>
> "[Lt. Owen Fletcher] was an angler, reeling in a six hundred ton
> catch on a line of almost unimaginable strength. Once a day, the
> self guided, captive probe would dive down toward Thallassa
> spinning out the cable behind it along a compex, thirty thousand
> kilometer curve. It would home automatically on the waiting
> payload, and when all the checks had been completed, the
> hoisting would begin."
>
> How cleverly ambiguous is this paragraph. It really isnt perfectly
> clear that the cable is being hoisted with the payload, but I
> interpreted it thus. spike
I recall a scene where an adventurous teenager climbs onto a payload
awaiting the lift, and presses his ear to the tether, listening to the
sounds trilling through it at 5 km/s. A tone builds up louder, then
suddenly the payload and the luckless trespasser lift into the sky,
destined for space.
Another Darwin award winner, folks.
Anyway, this implies that the whole blasted cable lifts as one unit, no
elevators climbing the rope.
I'd love to see a big tether on earth, with elevators coming and going
every thirty seconds. The skydiving operation sells tickets to 5 km
altitude by the gross- and if the descending elevators are fast enough,
you can fly around the tether in aerodynamic freefall and dock with
one. Do a hundred jumps in a day, and never open your chute...
Screw up on your approach to the down elevator, and you hit the
clifflike surface of the tether at 120 mph- Darwin awards would
available for all.
-- Doug Jones Rocket Plumber, XCOR Aerospace http://www.xcor-aerospace.com
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