In article ,
says...

Alain Fournier wrote on Tue, 19 Jun 2018
19:45:53 -0400:

On Jun/18/2018 at 11:00 PM, Fred J. McCall wrote :
Alain Fournier wrote on Mon, 18 Jun 2018
21:06:46 -0400:


You put the cable on an east coast.


Uh, do you mean west coast? If the thing falls isn't it going to lay
out along the direction of spin, which means it falls to the west.

Uh, no I meant east coast.

At least one of the two of us is making a very silly mistake here.


That would be me, although the 'obvious things' you mentioned were no
help at all.

For some reason known only to my tiny mind it was thinking of the
tether structure as having zero tangential velocity. That meant that
as it fell the Earth would rotate out from under it, leading to a fall
to anti-spinward.

Of course, that's absolutely wrong, since the further up the cable you
go the higher the tangential velocity has to be for the thing to stay
radially 'still'. That means as it falls the upper portions of the
cable will 'outrun' the surface of the Earth and it will fall to
spinward (to the East), which is what you said.

DOH!

It's kind of terrifying what the thing does. And where it breaks has a
huge impact on what it does as it falls.

http://gassend.net/spaceelevator/breaks/index.html

Jeff
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