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What if, instead of firing on a medical rocket, your object might land on a rope reaching as far as the sky? That’s what can happen with a space elevator.
The basics of Space Elevator
Suppose you built a huge tower about 400 miles[400 km]long. You could take a boat to the top and be in the air. Easy, okay? No, it really isn’t.
First of all, you could not make such a building with metal; its weight can squeeze and knock down the lower parts of the tower. Also, many things are needed.
But that is not a big problem — there is still a problem with speed. (Remember, you have to move very fast to get in a circular motion.) If you were standing on top of a 250-mile[400 km]base somewhere on the Earth’s equator, you would be moving, for the planet is spinning — this. it is like a man’s walk outside in a circle of excitement. Since the earth moves about once a day (there is a difference between sidereal and synodic rotation), it has an angular speed of 7.29 x 10-5 radians per second.
Angular speeds are different from line speed. It is a measure of the speed of rotation instead of what we think is speed – walking in a straight line. (Radians are a measurement unit for use in rotation, rather than degrees.)
If two people stand happily in a circle, they will both have the same angle. (Suppose it is 1 radian per second.) However, the person who is farther away from the center of the circle will be moving faster. Suppose one person is 1 meter from the center and the other is 3 meters from the center. Their velocity will be 1 m / s and 3 m / s respectively. The same applies to the surrounding Earth. It is possible to get so far that the rotation of the earth gives you the orbital speed needed to orbit the earth.
So let’s go back to our example of a man who stood on top of a tower about 250 miles[400 km]away. Is it too far away for the Earth to stand in the way? In the orbits of the Earth, their velocity is about 2 radians per day. This may not seem very fast, but at the equator this flexibility gives you a speed of 465 meters per second. That is over 1,000 miles per hour. However, it is not enough. The orbital speed (speed required to stay on the road) at an altitude of 7.7 km per second, or over 17,000 kilometers per hour.
Basically, there is another thing: When you increase your distance from Earth, the speed of the orbital decreases. If you leave at a distance of 400 to 800 km above the earth, the orbital speed decreases from 7.7 km / s to 7.5 km / s. This does not seem like a big difference, but remember, it is the surrounding area that is important and not the height of the earth’s surface. Ideally, you could build a magic tower that was too high to just walk away and sit around – but it had to be 36,000 miles long. It will not happen.
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