Space Tether - History

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.