| radishhead said: This has to be early april fools, surely? That is impossible |
Whether it will be managed in 38 years or not I don't know (doubtfull IMO) but as a concept it is feasable... Satellites in geostationary orbit remain above the same point in the Earth, in basic terms this is just attaching a cable between the two.
God knows what they will do about all the shit that's up there already though, all the satellites in geosynchronous polar orbit will be passing by the "cable"... I guess the active satellites can be programmed to boost around it, but there will surely be a bunch of dead satellites, maybe some that don't have propulsion, and still other junk from various space missions or even small bits of rock or from near miss asteroids.
EDIT: Got my terms wrong... however i'm not certain now that it's possible to have a geostationary orbit above Japan (it is possible to have a geosynchronous orbit that can keep Japan in sight, but this means the satellite's ground position would move about in an analemma, so wouldn't be useful for a lift). As such this lift would have to be made at the equator (at least from what I understand).
