On 2020-06-11 2:16 PM, Scott Kozel wrote:
On Thursday, June 11, 2020 at 1:24:46 PM UTC-4, David Spain wrote:

Another feature not to be discounted are stops along the cable that
remain in the atmosphere. You could have observation stations in both
lower and upper troposphere, stratosphere and ionosphere. Something that
is exceedingly difficult to do today, even with balloons.

Something that I haven't heard addressed, is how to protect the cable from
aircraft collisions. No matter how well marked and lighted, sooner or later an
aircraft will hit it, resulting in the severing of the cable and the crashing of
the aircraft.


As well as bad weather, high shearing winds, lightning strikes etc.
which would be all too common a problem no matter how well you sited the
ground station.

As far as stray aircraft is concerned: Well one of the schemes to power
the cable climber, uses ground based lasers to power it.

Just sayin'.... :-)

Dave

PS: On a serious note, doesn't look to me where the proposed ground site
would be, right along the equator and possibly out at sea to the west of
South America, near the Galapagos Islands, is a highly traversed area of
air transit. Obviously this would need to be an air travel exclusion
zone. But there is also terrorism to consider...