I will talk about the family of conics associated with a space elevator or a vertical orbital tether.
The presentation combines stuff from a number of my earlier blog posts. Here is the pdf I will use for this talk.
A screenshot from the cover of the booklet.
Pages 2 — 5 -- includes the visualizations I use to remember expressions for gravity and centrifugal acceleration. Which I use to show how canonical units are a whole lot easier to use than kilograms, kilometers and so on. For example the orbital periods or an orbit whose semi-major axis is k A.U. will have period k3/2 years. An asteroid whose semi-major axis is 4 A.U. will have a period of 8 years. A 9 A.U. semi-major axis gives a period of 27 years.
Pages 13 — 14 -- I believe my general method for finding a ZRVTO orbit between tethers is new and original. If anyone knows of this method appearing in earlier publications, please give me a heads up.
Page 14 -- Most moons we know of are in nearly circular tide locked orbits. For such moons beanstalks through Planet-Moon L1 and L2 are plausible. I believe this would be a wonderful science device. But today's science fiction writers seems oblivious to any of the Lagrange points other than L4 and L5.
Pages 15 and 16 -- Shameless self promotion. I don't get any royalties on the Dover coloring books, I was paid a straight fee of $100 per page. Regardless, I'd like to see the books sell. A Dover editor placed his bets on me and I hope he is rewarded for this gamble. I do make money on T-shirt sales though. My T-shirts are available at Ajo-Copper-News.com .
