Space Elevator to Asteroid

Completed 2025-02-14. Available releases:

A space-elevator is an elevator so tall it reaches into space. The top would be held up by centrifugal force (for example, the outward tug of a captive asteroid being whipped around by the cable into a faster orbit, like a ball on the end of a string being whirled around). Payloads could be hauled up and launched without requiring rockets. The major engineering challenge for a space elevator on Earth is that the cable would have to be ridiculously strong even to hold up its own weight, but it's very possible on other celestial objects, such as the Moon or Mars.

There is a ship coming in to dock from below, and is firing some sort of drive with a hydrogen plume. The ship will be in a lower altitude orbit, and if the horizontal velocities are matched, the ship will naturally fall gently radially away from the station, meaning powerful rockets always point out of the dock during docking and undocking.

Even so, this is artistic license. It implies a very low tension on the cable, and the approach trajectory of the rocket puts it too close to the cable. It would be better to have the dock on the outward radial direction. But then it wouldn't be so visible!

This is not the first time I have drawn a space elevator.

Artistically, this is just colored pencil on black construction paper with a bit of cleanup after scanning. There is a hint of Earthshine in the original, but the scan has washed it out. The smudges are supposed to be diffraction spikes.

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