On Thu, 31 Oct 2002, Brendan Moran wrote:

*>The anchoring process was somewhat hair raising, as he had the base of the
*>elevator drop in from space, using the steering rockets to align the
*>"bean-stock" and blew the charges to dump in the piled earth as the base of
*>the stalk was on its descent.  The result was that the coupling to the
*>earth was earthquake proof, since what was holding it was a mass of several
*>hundred tonnes of earth, and, due to the asteroid, the "bean-stalk"
*>wouldn't be likely to collapse.

I would hate to have to deal with the effects of the longitudinal and
other oscillations of this system (and what happens if the asteroid orbit
becomes elliptical because of them). Earthquake on demand ? Meteroite on
demand ? Weather effects on the lower end could be enough to induce the
oscillations. Anybody who knows about wind loads on tall structures etc
will tell you this. The tension induced by weather could exceed the
payload capacity by a couple of orders of magnitude.

Peter

*>Other than the anchoring process, the idea seems reasonable.

Hmmm.

*>The question remains: How would we anchor such a space elevator?

The best way imho would be to have the beanstalk free-floating with a
weight at the bottom flying high in the atmosphere (a big aircraft
basically). Access from ground would be by aircraft docking/landing on
the lower station.

Maintaining such a system in dynamic stability would be less hard than
maintaining an achored beanstalk. Besides it could be moved.

Peter

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