These structures are a sci-fi solution to the problem of getting objects into orbit without a rocket—but you don’t want to be under one if the cable snaps.
. This is around 400 kilometers above the surface of the Earth, about where the International Space Station is. In order to get this object into orbit, you need to accomplish two things. First, you need to lift it up 400 kilometers. But if you only increased the object’s altitude, it wouldn't be in space for long. It would just fall back to Earth. So, second, in order to keep this thing in LEO, it has to move—really fast.
The total energy to get just that 1-kilogram object into orbit would be about 33 million joules. For comparison, if you pick up a textbook from the floor and put it on a table, that takes about 10 joules. It would take a lot more energy to get into orbit. But that's not the biggest problem—there's still the issue with speed. If you were standing on the top of a 400-kilometer tower with the base somewhere on the Earth's equator, you would indeed be moving, because the planet is rotating—this is just like the motion of a person on the outside of a spinning merry-go-round. Since the Earth rotates about once a day , it has an angular velocity of 7.29 x 10Angular velocity is different than linear velocity.
Actually, there's another factor: As you increase your distance from the Earth, the orbital velocity also decreases. If you go from an altitude of 400 to 800 kilometers above the surface of the Earth, the orbital speed decreases from 7.7 km/s to 7.5 km/s. That doesn't seem like a large difference, but remember, it's really the orbital radius that matters and not just the height above the surface of the Earth.
To get this to work, you would need a large mass in orbit—either a space station or a small asteroid. The mass has to be large so that it doesn't get pulled out of orbit every time something climbs up the cable.
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