Posted on 07/14/2005 7:29:13 PM PDT by KevinDavis
A team of university graduate students and faculty from Tennessee, with the help of NASA engineers, have "launched" a subscale spacecraft model and caught it in mid-air with a unique rendezvous or "catch" mechanism.
Their successful demonstration of this mechanism that could grab a payload or craft traveling in space marks a critical milestone in development of a tether-based propulsion system.
The professors and graduate students at Tennessee Technological University in Cookeville designed, built and recently tested the subscale tether catch mechanism in a university laboratory.
(Excerpt) Read more at spacedaily.com ...
Cool beans!
They said flight was impossible, so we'll see.
I've read too many assertions that the math just doesn't work. It can't be built, not on this planet.
Thanks for the Ping.
I apologize, I was refering to space elevators. Tethers are a different pie-in-the-sky (literally, almost).
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