skyhook n. 4

Satellite Elongation into a True ‘Sky-Hook’.

And take a look at the old reports on the dynamics of the bridge. You'll see that it’s usually called a skyhook, although it always seems to be more like a Beanstalk.

We might erect a skyhook, a cable into space.

I have never liked riding the Beanstalk. My distaste was full-blown even before the disaster to the Quito Skyhook. A cable that goes up into the sky with nothing to hold it up smells too much of magic.

‘The big difference here,’ Jao rushed in, ‘is that Original Man’s skyhook used two tethers, anchored fifty miles apart.’

Now the hubs are built around the skyhooks—towers of hyperfiber rising to the lucrative geosynchronous orbits.

‘A few hundred elevators at least will be attached to the cable, and loads will be lifted into orbit using a counterweight system. There will be lots of material to load down from Earth as usual, so energy requirements for lifts will be minimized. It will also be possible to use the cable’s rotation as a slingshot; objects released from the ballast asteroid toward Earth will be using the power of Mars’s rotation as their push, and will have an energy-free high-speed take-off. It’s a clean, efficient, extraordinarily cheap method, both for lifting bulk into space and for accelerating it toward Earth… Once a carbonaceous asteroid is pushed into the proper orbit, and a nuclear-powered robotic cable plant put to work on it, the plant will extrude cable like a spider spinning its thread.’… The miracle of the skyhook. Jack and the Beanstalk, the Ascension to Heaven; it definitely had an air of the miraculous to it.

After planetfall, Red Mars chronicles the inevitable taming and settlement of the new world—from the establishment of underground headquarters, to the discovery of an effecting anti-aging treatment, to the dropping of an immense ‘skyhook’ from ‘aerosynchronous’ orbit.

There were always a few gasps from travelers who were looking at it for the first time. Skyhooks were, if not the most incredible of human engineering marvels, then certainly the most spectacular. Five of the nine worlds had them, and one was under construction on Tigris. Greenway’s skyhook, which was connected to Terminal City, was now about twelve kilometers away. Its enormous bulk rose out of the downtown area and soared into the clouds.

The shredded cablehead…had once joined Singing Port to the surface, in the pre-Bombardment days when skyhooks were practical because human beings thought they were the only species in the interstellar neighborhood.

Several skyhooks have unfurled in equatorial orbit around the earth like the graceful fernlike leaves of sundews, ferrying cargo and passengers to and from orbit.

That tough first step of getting from Earth’s surface to LEO? With an Artsutanov skyhook it was no problem at all!