Skyhook: First prototype of the Space Elevator

Reading Time: 3 minutes

Expensive and limited trips into space

Traveling into space was one of the biggest achievements made by humans. Nowadays the trips to outer space are very expensive and need years of preparations and tons of specialized equipment. With each year the technology advances further and we are making big steps in the direction of easier exploration of the unknown. NASA and SpaceX are constantly improving their rockets and spacecrafts in hope to finally make a big breakthrough and achieve something, about what people in the past could only dream. But those types of space transportation need to reach the velocity of about 40,000 kilometers per hour to successfully launch from the Earth into space. In order to achieve this speed, rockets need giant amounts of fuel, and because of that the payload that can be loaded onto them is very limited. This restricts the amount of the necessary equipment that can be launched with each rocket. But what if there was a way to get into space by using less fuel and with more payload? The answer is the Skyhook.

 

What is the Skyhook?

200 km long non-rotating Skyhook, as proposed by E. Sarmont in 1990

The very first concepts for the Skyhook were presented back in 1966, but the version with the most potential was proposed to NASA by Giuseppe Colombo, an Italian scientist, in the early 1970s. It was the idea of attaching a stabilized cable to satellites orbiting the Earth. The concept was improved during the years and right now it was simplified to just a cable connected a weight. This structure would orbit around the Earth and function as a ladder for spaceships. Because the Earth’s atmosphere, the lower end of the tether would hang on the height of around 80 to 150 kilometers above the Earth’s surface. The specialized spacecrafts would launch from the Earth, attach to  the bottom end of the tether and then be transported to the upper end. This would allow to build spaceships that need less fuel and can transport larger amounts of payload to the satellites. This concept is know as the Non-rotating Skyhook. The scientist also work on the more advanced Rotation Skyhook. This construction wouldn’t be much different from it’s other version, but as the name suggests it would rotate around it’s center of mass. Because of this, we could use the Skyhook to send the spacecrafts off further into space, by using its rotation speed and less fuel. This could enable humans easier and faster travels between planets in the future. One Skyhook could orbit around the Earth and the second one around the Mars. The first one would launch shuttles in the direction of Mars and the second one could grab them and let them safely land. This would also work the other way around and would the first step to building a proper space infrastructure.

A rotating Skyhook as first proposed by H. Moravec in 1977

 

References:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skyhook_(structure)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dqwpQarrDwk

https://space.nss.org/l5-news-the-rocket-skyhook-combination/

https://skyhooksandspaceelevators.wordpress.com/2015/04/29/hello-world/

Leave a Reply

WordPress › Error

There has been a critical error on this website.

Learn more about debugging in WordPress.