Just double checked my math, and that should read 36.5 million tonnes.
Also, this example cable will mass about 200kg/m, so a 100 ton payload would shift the center of mass by about 500m, or 1/120,000 of the total.
Finally, as someone else mentioned earlier (and as Kim Stanley Robinson wrote about in his Mars trilogy) the best way to get the required material into orbit would be to start with an asteroid, which will probably mass somewhere on the order of 1 billion tonnes. Again, very able to withstand a little weather or asymmetry.
Your one of few here who have given this any serious thought, but you fail to mention that the satellites you describe are fairly 'rigid' bodied. This 'cable', no matter how strong, to be practically 'unreeled', will have flex properties. It also has mass as you describe, and orbit dynamics of large flex structures, as well as mag field interaction (if it is conductive at all), will force all kinds of dynamics besides gravity on it.
This is one of many ideas, but its not the winner. I will bet on it.
I do have some questions.
First, I assumed the the center of mass would have to be beyond GS Orbit, to provide tension and force to oppose the forces involved in lifting the load. With the center mass directly at GS, this obviously isn't the case.
What then would be used to oppose the forces of lifting the payload? Or is the shear mass of the assembly enough to resist movement by any force imposed from lifting the pay load?
Once the payload was up to is traveling speed along the elevator, there would be no acceleration thus no thrusting force, but there would have to be acceleration to get it up to speed. Also, I would think moving the load through the atmosphere would have a slight effect as aerodynamic forces work against the load as it moved up. Wouldn't that over time, after thousands of lifts, tend to pull the assembly out of perfect GS orbit? And then, wouldn't an equal amount of force, be needed to move it back? If so, how may lifts could be performed before making a correction?
Or can the acceleration of the payload be done slow enough to prevent that? If so, how long would it take to get a load up?
At what point does the load become self motivating, if you will. I would think once past geosynchronous, it would be on its own being "flung" out along the elevator by the orbital velocity of the assembly. By the time it reached the end, the velocity would be well over standard geosynchronous velocity. If you wanted to stop it before it went off the end, how would you do that? That's a lot of energy to convert, absorb or dissipate.
Hope I'm not bugging you too much.
It seems you could use the breaking action beyond its center of mass to provide any correcting thrust needed to counteract the force used to accelerate the load up to speed. If that's the case, you could use as much acceleration as you wanted to get the load up to speed, and use the breaking at the other end to compensate for it.
Does that sound halfway plausible? Would you even want or need to stop the load anyway?
Lift that to geosychronous orbit!
According to the link in post #185, the ribbon cable will only weigh 1000 tons. A 100 ton rising payload is gonna bend that sucker like a banana.
Never mind all the questions then as they're irrelevant in that type of setup.
Thanks anyway.