Ideally your tether is going to constantly adjust its orbit so it says far away from the atmosphere, but for fun I did a calculation of what would happen if a 10K tonne tether (suitable for boosting 100 tonne payloads) fell to the Earth. Apparently it just breaks up in the atmosphere and produces very little damage. More discussion here:
You can absolutely harvest potential energy from the solar system to spin up tethers. ToughSF has some good posts on this:
https://toughsf.blogspot.com/2018/06/inter-orbital-kinetic-energy-exchanges.html https://toughsf.blogspot.com/2020/07/tethers-all-way.html
Ideally your tether is going to constantly adjust its orbit so it says far away from the atmosphere, but for fun I did a calculation of what would happen if a 10K tonne tether (suitable for boosting 100 tonne payloads) fell to the Earth. Apparently it just breaks up in the atmosphere and produces very little damage. More discussion here:
https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/1eqe48g/comment/liaouaa/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button
I was proposing something different.