From Hillary Shaw, University of Leeds
I wouldn’t like to be the insurer of the space elevator, in case the cable
broke due to a meteorite or perhaps stray manmade space debris. If it did, we
had better hope it didn’t break near the top, because “all” that would happen
then is that about 40,000 kilometres of cable, plus the space station and maybe
the 30-kilometre tower as well, would crash into the ocean with enough kinetic
energy to create a large tsunami. This would then flood the coast of whichever
poor Third World country was unfortunate enough to be nearest the space
lift.
If the cable broke near the bottom, initially the anchoring meteorite,
trailing a space station and several tens of thousands of kilometres of cable,
would rise away from the Earth. But it would probably not escape the Earth’s
gravity, but go into a hard-to-predict elliptical orbit. At some later point it
could crash back to Earth, hopefully not near a city.
Come to think of it, perhaps the dinosaurs did have a space programme.
Safety and environmental concerns about the scheme are addressed
in detail in the NASA report Space Elevators: an advanced earth-space
infrastructure for the new millennium, on
http://flightprojects.msfc.nasa.gov/fd02_elev.html—Ed
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