My understanding is that it would be under tension and orbiting at beyond escape velocity, such that if it got cut off, it would fly away from Earth. Still bad, but not catastrophically. Maybe we could even recover it.
That all assumes that it got loose at the base and not part way up within the atmosphere. If 9/11 can happen, this can happen. All that cable and kinetic energy has to go somewhere.
If your bad guys can get high enough to sever your cable, they can get high enough to do a kinetic or powered bombardment and cause magnitudes more damage.
Plus accidents are more likely than you think. A rocket just exploded this morning, and read up on rates of railroad or shipping screwups. A train full of apples and pallets of kleenex going over ain't a big deal but the same containers falling out of the sky will certainly cause more damage.
I can’t take a tube of toothpaste on a plane. How am I going to pack a bomb large enough to cause that much damage. Why don’t people blow up planes with that method today?
If a tether breaks high up, then only a few kilometers of the tether hit the ground. Anything higher burns up on the way down (since it is very thin, so surface plasma heating doesn't take long to destroy it)
The structure wouldn't be able to passively stay together. If it was to be destroyed then it would burn up in the atmosphere like anything else. It is not made of a magic non-existent material that is infinitely strong. Of course if you had a massive dense asteroid attached that would not, so it makes sense to be careful with what is around it. But the orbital ring itself would break up and be no more dangerous than a bunch of satellites of similar mass.
Also it would not be an "Ultimate target" for "terrorists". Terrorists are violent political activists, not super villains that want to destroy the world. I doubt, for example, that the new-IRA would get a united Ireland by destroying orbital infrastructure.
To the extent that an elevator would represent both the power and interests of whatever rich entity had managed to construct it, it would be a target for those who want to reduce the power and harm the interests of that entity.
>I doubt, for example, that the new-IRA would get a united Ireland by destroying orbital infrastructure.
The most effective way for the new-IRA to unite Ireland would be to help the UK keep shooting itself in the foot, so that the Northern Ireland citizens get sick of regular Ireland being better off economically, and vote to join it.
I'm more concerned about what's already within our atmosphere and isn't going to burn up. That's a lot of kinetic energy, and nobody says it's going to destroy the Earth, I said it would be devastating.
You're forgetting religious extremists and countless suicide bombers.
It would be cheaper to drop an equivalent massed object out of a plane. Or just use the plane as the weapon.
You break a space elevator at the ground, it floats upwards.
You break it at 30,000 foot then everything above the break floats away upwards, everything below "crashes" down, at a relatively low terminal velocity and thus with pretty low amounts of energy.
An elevator isn't a tower, it's a rope handing from a counterweight in orbit which is kept taut by a centrifugal force. It's anchored at the ground to stop the rock floating away, but if you break that anchor everything above will swing away from Earth
If you have the ability to break the cable at say 100km above the ground, you have the ability to drop objects from that height anyway, don't have to deal with no-fly-zones, and can target somewhere not on the equator.
Want to cause chaos? Get a bunch of heavy dense cheap bits of metal, put them in a high altitude balloon, then drop them over a city. You'll cause more damage to the people on the ground than anything you could do to a space elevator (short of the financial impact of having to resplice it)
If you can damage the elevator at the counterweight end, then you have the ability to drop a "rod from god" and cause more damage that way.
> "crashes" down, at a relatively low terminal velocity
I would like to see an analysis. 100’s of tons of string falling and accelerating the surrounding sheath of air (acts absolutely nothing like a meteorite). A good physics question!
That’s assuming you can’t say detonate a bomb inside the cargo thus resulting in vastly longer section falling down.
Space elevators are inherently create a new safety risk as cutting them at geosynchronous orbit only takes compromising some security and building a modest bomb. Both of which are achievable by terrorist organizations.
Accidentally deleted a bit: Space elevators are inherently a means to reach orbit so they create …
PS: 911 didn’t happen because terrorists suddenly figured out how to build giant aircraft to douse buildings in tons of jet fuel they subverted an existing system that solved 99.9% of the technical problems. Thus by getting a few violent individuals on board with simple weapons simplified things to only needed to fly an aircraft that someone else built, got into the air, and filled with fuel.
That's true-ish, but don't forget that a space elevator is also an enormous amount of orbiting mass all on it's own. So a small bomb can cause it all to come down and wrap around the planet twice.
For a ring with a density of 10kg/m, that kinetic energy is about 5 megatons… spread over 40,000km.
It's negligible when it's that diffuse. Even if it didn't burn up, it's mostly lost to air resistance, with everything over a few hundred meters being limited to about terminal velocity.
Probably still want to engineer it such that destruction is controlled rather than uncontrollable, but the biggest issue with it being destroyed would be no longer having it; the damage would be mostly within a meter or so of where it lands, which isn't great but it's also not devastating unless you happen to be that close.
Think a very long I-beam falling off a skyscraper during construction, not an asteroid.
Assuming the cable is rated for the sudden force changes and won't get split into a whole bunch of smaller pieces that will drop at just their terminal velocities. Think a shower of cable pieces rather than a whip. Not great, but it's likely that most of the energy will be dissipated by the atmosphere.
