One way to regain energy is to run the tether in reverse—drop something from a faster orbit back into the atmosphere, siphoning off some of its energy along the way. If every time you sent one spacecraft up another was lined up to come back down, that would save a lot of trouble.
But you’ll still need to do orbital corrections, offset atmospheric drag, and allow for imbalances, so yeah, it would seem like you still need a pretty beefy means of propulsion on this thing, which is oddly unmentioned for being key to the whole design.
One way to regain energy is to run the tether in reverse—drop something from a faster orbit back into the atmosphere, siphoning off some of its energy along the way. If every time you sent one spacecraft up another was lined up to come back down, that would save a lot of trouble.
But you’ll still need to do orbital corrections, offset atmospheric drag, and allow for imbalances, so yeah, it would seem like you still need a pretty beefy means of propulsion on this thing, which is oddly unmentioned for being key to the whole design.