History
Tsiolkovsky once proposed a tower so tall that it reached into space, so that it would be held there by the rotation of the Earth. However, at the time, there was no realistic way to build it.
To try to solve the problems in Komsomolskaya Pravda (July 31, 1960), another Russian, Yuri Artsutanov, wrote in greater detail about the idea of a tensile cable to be deployed from a geosynchronous satellite; downwards towards the ground, and upwards away; keeping the cable balanced. This is the space elevator idea, a type of synchronous tether that would rotate with the Earth. However, given the current materials technology of the time, this too was impractical on Earth.
In the 1970s Jerome Pearson explored synchronous tethers further, and in particular analysed the lunar elevator that can go through the L1 and L2 points, and this was found to be possible with materials then existing.
In 1977 Hans Moravec and later Robert L. Forward investigated the physics of synchronous and non synchronous skyhook tethers, and performed detailed simulations of tapered tethers that could pick objects off and place objects onto the Moon, Mars and other planets, with little, or even a net gain of energy.
In 1979 the USA NASA examined the feasibility of the idea and gave direction to the study of tethered systems, especially tethered satellites. In 2000, the NASA and Boeing considered a HASTOL concept where a tether would take payloads from a hypersonic aircraft (at half of orbital velocity) to orbit.
Read more about this topic: Space Tether
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“When the landscape buckles and jerks around, when a dust column of debris rises from the collapse of a block of buildings on bodies that could have been your own, when the staves of history fall awry and the barrel of time bursts apart, some turn to prayer, some to poetry: words in the memory, a stained book carried close to the body, the notebook scribbled by hand—a center of gravity.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“We aspire to be something more than stupid and timid chattels, pretending to read history and our Bibles, but desecrating every house and every day we breathe in.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“All things are moral. That soul, which within us is a sentiment, outside of us is a law. We feel its inspiration; out there in history we can see its fatal strength.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)