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Re:What about intermediate designs? (Score:1)
by vincecate (741268) on Tuesday July 06, @03:12PM (#9623808)
(Last Journal: Wednesday January 14, @03:16PM)
The combination of a reusable-suborbital rocket and a rotating tether could be built today.

The tether can get energy back from tourists returning to Earth. So if your main traffic is tourists going up and down, the tether energy is easy. Another fun trick is that if you had a series of tether in LEO, GEO, and Lunar orbit you could send stuff to the moon and send moon rocks (or other stuff) back to the Earth without needed to add energy. You just keep the total mass going each way balanced.

Because of this, orbital or lunar tourism will not take much more energy than suborbital rocket rides. So we should see it within the next 20 years.

I have a site, spacetethers.com [spacetethers.com] that has info and a Java applet tether simulator. There is also lots of info at tethers.com [tethers.com]