It’s like a shorter, less demanding space elevator that spins with a counterweight. It would enable you to reversibly fling things in and out of orbits just using mechanical force.
Wikipedia has an article complete with a nice gif of how it would move in this exact scenario, to connect with a craft at 0 groundspeed.
Depends where you release. I haven’t actually done the orbital calculations for this, but I’m assuming there’s some setup that would work for juggling scheduled flights around the globe. If not, it’s a better propulsion technique or bust, basically.
It’s like a shorter, less demanding space elevator that spins with a counterweight. It would enable you to reversibly fling things in and out of orbits just using mechanical force.
Wikipedia has an article complete with a nice gif of how it would move in this exact scenario, to connect with a craft at 0 groundspeed.
From that gif it looks like the sky hook has to be orbiting. But then its release point is giving objects twice the velocity required for orbit.
Depends where you release. I haven’t actually done the orbital calculations for this, but I’m assuming there’s some setup that would work for juggling scheduled flights around the globe. If not, it’s a better propulsion technique or bust, basically.
Yeah, there must be some point on the arc that gets you back to some point on Earth