🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <51016@seismo.CSS.GOV> black@seismo.CSS.GOV (Mike Black) writes:
>NASA claims they intend to generate electricity with the tether 
>experiment coming up Monday.  Seeing as how a magnetic field has
>no energy, wouldn't any energy gained come the movement of the
>shuttle & tether?  If so, you would lose orbital velocity which
>would have to be made up by additional thrust thereby negating
>any energy gained.  Or am I missing something?
>Mike...
>-- 
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On my local news, the commentator said that some experts say that a satellite
tethered to the earth could provide a free, unending source of electrical
power.  This sounds suspicious to me.  I think you will only get back
something on the order of the energy to put the satellite up (i.e. changing
the orbital energy to electrical energy).

On one of the all night news services shown by one of network affiliates
here in Pittsburgh, their science correspondent was talking about
20k Volts of current flowing through that tether (a single wire).  I forget
what else he said, but it was all so garbled, I could get almost no information
out of his talk (really disappointing).

On National Public Radio, they said that the real idea was ultimately to
use the idea backwards, i.e. as a motor, rather than as a generator.
They said that the hope was that they could use solar panels to generate
electric power to flow current through a tether, to help maintain
orbits of large satellites or space staions, etc.

The latter explanation makes the most sense to me, but then again, I'm
no expert on this idea.  Any experts out there in netland care to 
enlighten us?

John
snyder@henry.ece.cmu.edu