this post was submitted on 24 Jul 2024
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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
Several. Not getting on the skyhook sends you straight down, getting off at the top puts you into a solar orbit (escape velocity from Earth is ~11km/s, local escape velocity from Sol is ~42km/s, and we end up with 15km/s or so). In between releases should somehow do in between things.
You also need to have a skyhook in sync at the destination as you land, though, and they need to switch out between scheduled flights to keep a reasonable momentum, so it gets complicated. I realised after writing this you probably want to be able to survivably "crash land" at orbital speed if you miss the tether coming down, so that adds weight as well.
I'd still guess it's viable.