/sci/ - Science & Math

>>16081175
tethers don't require magic materials and Starship is approaching or exceeding the theoretical $/kg to orbit that a space elevator would do
Starship is so good it is basically making space elevators obsolete (even if it was possible to build one on earth)

this and tethers might make stuff launched with Starship or a subsequent system even cheaper though, you would need to launch quite a bit of propellant just to keep this thing in orbit, but I guess the gain is that the station keeping engines on this thing would ultimately have better ISP than a Starship uppter stage?
so with large enough scale it would make $/kg cheaper (or perhaps you could even launch propellants from the moon with mass drivers to fuel these)