Yahoo Autos The Skyhook Could Slingshot Mankind Across The Solar System
The International Space Station is due for decommission in the 2030s. NASA is currently evaluating how to go about retiring the station: options include letting it burn up in the atmosphere or pushing it into a graveyard orbit. There’s another option that doesn’t involve disposing of the ISS at all, which would extend the life of the station by leveraging its considerable size and mass for future space missions. The ISS could be the ideal anchor for a skyhook that would act like a slingshot to propel people and cargo into space cheaply, as Aeon reports.
The concept is so bafflingly simple that it’s a mystery why agencies around the globe are not all-in on the idea. Go read this essay over at Aeon, which goes into detail to describe the skyhook (or skyhooks) to see what it’s all about. The gist of it is that space junk, or debris that has accumulated over decades of space exploration, could be used as counterweights attached to tethers that catch spacecraft in the Earth’s atmosphere, then release them into space.
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That’s where the ISS and other large “dead” satellites, such as Envisat — a 26-meter long, 10-meter wide former communications satellite — come in.These could provide a major component of the skyhooks. The ISS, too, since it’s the largest object humanity has launched into space. Per Aeon:
