As I understand it (see: not at all), if you leave a spaceship with no suit on, you’d get baked like Marie Curie’s ovaries from the radiation. It’s mainly our atmosphere that protects us from most of the nastiest stuff. Would a giant cable reaching from Earth all the way to a platform outside the atmosphere become dangerously-radioactive over time? And if so, would that eventually cause the entire planet to get radioactive over hundreds of years? Kinda like if the hole in the Ozone layer were replaced with a Mario pipe.
And if that is the case, maybe we could forget the elevator aspect of it and just aim for a free eternal source of radioactive energy, like a really shitty Dyson sphere 👀
By the necessities of its design a space elevator has to reach geostationary orbit, which would make it tall enough to wrap around the planet twice if it fell. Wouldn’t really matter if you built it on a west coast or not.
A geostationary orbit is ~35,000km from the surface of the earth. The circumference of the earth is ~40,000km.
And not all would fall. Part of it would be launched outwards by inertia.
Ah thanks, I was a dingus and looked up the diameter instead of the circumference. Still doesn’t really matter where you build it. No matter what it’s fucking up a a good portion of the equator if it falls.
It still can’t really fall. It’d be moving incredibly fast sideways. Fast enough to miss the Earth for a while. Geo stationary orbit is the point where orbital speed matches Earth’s rotational speed, so if it’s anchored at the ground, then it’s at orbital speed if at GEO. The higher the orbit, the slower the orbital speed. So using a higher orbit to maintain tension means it’d be traveling beyond escape velocity, held down by the cable. A break would release the mass into the solar system
I think that depends on how big the tether is tbh. It has to be usable as an elevator so it can’t just be a thin cable. And your scenario is assuming that it would be cut down near the base, if it’s damaged anywhere higher up anything below the cut will fall down to earth.
Yeah that’s kinda what I was envisioning, maybe half the tether zingin off into space when the other half fell into the pacific or desert, but even half is gonna be like 15,000km I guess.
Also wasn’t there a scenario like this in one of the Mars Trilogy books?
Not certain about the mars trilogy but there is a collapsing space elevator in the foundation series (at least on the show, haven’t read the books yet.)
Actually, a good ways passed geostationary orbit if I remember correctly. It needs centrifugal force to keep the cable taut, since it won’t be supporting its weight from the surface.