#space tether

I've grown a habit of being afraid to express my thoughts because I have grown to believe that my thoughts are some of the most horrible things that can be expressed to the world/void at large.

(Sidenote: I'm currently working on my Master's degree in Information Systems Management and sheesh. I wish my breaks from completing this discussion paper were longer... I honestly have to get work done by tonight so it's a good thing that my breaks are as short as they are but still. Can't I just be lazy in peace?)

When it comes to this Space Tether thing, it seems like a big project... And it is! But if I can get this thing up and running by the time I am 40 omg I would have such a good life. I would feel extremely proud of myself...

I've been posting things here and there on this blog but I think I might start taking things up a notch.

I want to code for fun... And this project is a hobby for me to work on. If I rub two brain cells together, I get the idea of coding things to complete this extremely big-dicked project.

I'm gonna go eat before I have to work some more.

Case 1

So we have a Stanford Torus, a wheel-shaped rotating city in space with a radius of 830 meters and mass of about 10 billion kilograms, 95% of which is radiation shielding. It’s home to around 10,000 people, and it’s in its originally proposed location of the Earth-Moon L5 Lagrange point.

At that location, the Torus has a Hill Sphere of just under three kilometers in radius (assuming, like a good pretend physicist, that the torus is actually a solid sphere). It can support small stable satellites at up to half that distance from itself, or out to just under twice its own radius. These satellites will slowly drift around the torus, taking just over five and a half days to complete a single orbit.

What can we do with that? Why would we bother?

Imagine running a telescope attached to the Stanford Torus. You’re trying to watch a specific part of the sky, but the entire time, you have to deal with the Torus’s 1 rpm rotation and every vibration and tremor. If the telescope is separate, it doesn’t need to worry about either of those factors. And if it’s orbiting the Torus at just a few hundred meters, travel to and from the Torus for maintenance is simple and easy, and there’s no appreciable communications lag for control.

Or imagine you’re assembling or maintaining spacecraft. For the most part, gravity’s an annoyance, and on the Torus moving around significant masses of raw materials could cause stability problems and might need careful scheduling. If your dry dock is orbiting the Torus, you can be close to your workforce while maintaining complete control and autonomy over your own facility.

Or, let’s say that we actually care about safety. We can support a fuel storage and refueling station while keeping it far enough from the station that in a disaster, an explosion that would have split our city in two if it happened inside or in contact with the city will spread and dissipate so that it only causes a brief shudder.

Case 2

We have the same Torus, but now it’s orbiting the Sun instead of Earth. The major difference for the Torus is that relative to the Sun, its Hill Sphere is close to eighteen kilometers. And the difference that makes is that now it’s easy for two or more Tori to orbit each other. And at same time a lone torus, or a pair of them, can support more and more stable satellites.

Case 3

Now we have a 1 km diameter metallic asteroid in the same orbit as Case 2, with a mass of about 2.6 trillion tons. This has a Hill Sphere of over 1000 kilometers, allowing it to host other, smaller asteroids and space stations at a distance of up to something like 570 kilometers. Mining operations on such an asteroid could sort bulk materials and launch them to be caught and processed by specialized orbiting refineries. With an orbital velocity of only 0.5 meters per second at the location of the farthest stable orbits, there’d be only a trivial energy cost in moving the material, and the launching could be handled by hydraulic catapult systems rather than having to rely on mass drivers.

These bulky payloads could take weeks to reach their destinations, but in a hurry passengers could make the same trips in hours without major fuel costs.

Or, alternatively, a 1 km asteroid could support a station anchoring a rotovator allowing it to accept traffic from, and launch traffic to, destinations throughout the solar system without a significant need for fuel.

Case 4

Now one of our Stanford Tori is orbiting our asteroid from Case 3. If we keep it 570 kilometers from the asteroid, the torus itself will maintain a six kilometer Hill Sphere. That’s large enough that our torus can host an orbiting drydock large enough to construct entire cities using the materials from the parent asteroid.