Thanks for the great article. I think that the idea of asking “how many re-uses does this thing give before wearing out” is a great way of focusing the mind away from the super fancy materials. I love the idea of all these spaceships doing a “strip the willow” type dance with one another.
In terms of dropping things from orbit to re-spool your tethers. One component of that might be old/redundant/broken satellites. Its kind of like fuel recycling, the fuel that went into accelerating a satellite 20 years ago can be re-extracted (at some efficiency) by transferring that kinetic energy to something new that is not obsolete.
Thanks for the great article. I think that the idea of asking “how many re-uses does this thing give before wearing out” is a great way of focusing the mind away from the super fancy materials. I love the idea of all these spaceships doing a “strip the willow” type dance with one another.
In terms of dropping things from orbit to re-spool your tethers. One component of that might be old/redundant/broken satellites. Its kind of like fuel recycling, the fuel that went into accelerating a satellite 20 years ago can be re-extracted (at some efficiency) by transferring that kinetic energy to something new that is not obsolete.