Sorry there have been no posts lately – I came down with something which made me feel somewhat on the order of “death warmed over.” I’m feeling nearly alive now and should be posting again soon…
The Space Elevator Blog
For scalable, inexpensive access to space…
I am not sure where is the most proper place to place this question; my apologies if this is not the correct place for it. In any case, regarding the idea that whenever an extremely large payload is sent up the space elevator, that the rotation of the earth will slow down imperceptibly: is it possible that this is truly a dangerous suggestion, that actually changing the speed of the rotation of the earth itself, even imperceptibly, might have some negative, and most likely irreversible, negative effect(s) ?
It’s one of those ‘in theory it’s possible but in reality don’t worry about it’ things
Yes, sending stuff up will slow down our rotation. As will my favorite application – using the tip to fling loads out of cis-lunar space.
But we’re talking millions of years of operations and megatons of material – more than could be shipped in reality – to do the job.
I agree with Brian – it’s too small of a problem to worry about. In addition, at some point the elevator is hopefully going to be bringing stuff down as well as sending it up and the effect of this will be to speed up the rotation…