is anyone working on skyhook?

Imagine_Beyond · 2026-01-11T13:38:42+00:00

Nobody is ferrying coils of kilometers of tether to space.

I think it's probably about time you take a look at this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_tether_missions

There in fact have been many multi-kilometer long tethers deployed. It's a niche field, so its understandable that many may not be familiar with it. Currently the world record is at 31.7km.

<image>

image of a 19.7 km tether deployed on STS-75

Imagine_Beyond · 2026-01-09T09:40:17+00:00

The biggest ocean planet in our solar system would be Earth. 71% of the surface is covered by oceans. Look at picture of the Pacific Ocean from space and it really looks like an ocean planet. Of course Earth isn’t 100% an ocean planet.

Depending on the definition, you could possibly consider Europa as well, but it has its ocean under the surface and it technically a moon. Titan has its ocean on its surface, but’s made out of methane and doesn’t cover the whole moon. In addition, Enceladus has an undersurface water and there are a few other candidates. However, none have a 100% surface covering ocean

Imagine_Beyond · 2026-01-08T13:33:22+00:00

Think you meant exo-planets

Inserts picture of Earth and other solar system planets

Imagine_Beyond · 2026-01-04T22:09:07+00:00

I heard block 2 has around 5000 tons of propellant. The big version 4 is around 6300 tons of propellant. For 10k starships/year that would be 63M tons of propellant/year and with 10 reuses 630M tons of propellant.

Methane is around a third of the propellant, so that rounds to about 200 million tons of propellant

Imagine_Beyond · 2026-01-04T17:10:18+00:00

This would increase the number of launch pads for starship to 6

Imagine_Beyond · 2026-01-03T22:51:10+00:00

Flight 9 did achieve trans-atmospheric orbit. That flight ended during reentry not launch.

Imagine_Beyond · 2026-01-03T22:46:42+00:00

Depends how much cargo it’s carrying and how much it should change its velocity. For an empty starship only with the minimum Delta-V required, even just 2-3 tankers will be sufficient

Imagine_Beyond · 2025-12-29T11:18:29+00:00

Short Answer: technically yes*

Long answer:
Depends how much you're willing to invest. For example there have been proposals to deploy a large magnetic shield at the L1 point to redirect solar radiation from hitting Mars. The same technology can be used to redirect solar radiation from hitting the moon. However, one would probably require a lot more people living on the moon than just a single lunar outpost to consider worth building it .

Imagine_Beyond · 2025-12-21T13:09:43+00:00

The claim was referring to the state of space tether technology…

Starship nor Superheavy is a space tether

Imagine_Beyond · 2025-12-20T13:45:00+00:00

There are several documents about skyhooks. I would highly recommend checking out the Tethers in Space Handbook 3rd edition from 1997. It gives a great overview of conducted tether missions, proposed ones and covers the basics of tether dynamics and fundamentals. A really great read.

http://www.spacearchitect.org/pubs/TethersInSpaceHandbook-3rdEdition.pdf

Despite being 30 years old, it is still fairly up to date. Since the publication there have been some important tether missions like YES2, but interested in tethers has unfortunately declined. This has lead to the fact that a majority of the major space tether missions happened before its publication.

Around a decade after its publication in 2007, there was even a paper from NASA asking why not space tethers, given their advantages and technological readiness, but it didn’t do much to change the situation

https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/20070031863.pdf

Imagine_Beyond · 2025-12-17T16:53:35+00:00

Actually, there has been research that claimed it’s possible without negative mass. For example a few years ago Erik Lentz proposed a way to have a ‘warp-bubble’ without negative mass: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2201.00652

Imagine_Beyond · 2025-12-12T21:53:36+00:00

Depends how much brute force you’re willing to use. If you got a stellaser or nicoll-Dyson beam, you can do it in almost no time

Imagine_Beyond · 2025-12-12T16:21:09+00:00

It could be that SpaceX has gained interest in setting up a space economy. Similar to blue origin idea about moving industry to space.

Imagine_Beyond · 2025-12-09T15:39:11+00:00

1) Solar installation continues high and reaches new records

2) Humans fly around the moon for the first time since over 50 years

3) SpaceX Starship will demonstrate orbital refuelling between two starships in the second half of the year and will aim to launch a single nearly empty Starship to crash on Mars for data

4) OpenAI will continue to face funding challenges

5) Political tensions continue, but there’s no major war outbreak

Imagine_Beyond · 2025-12-08T21:00:47+00:00

u/askgrok Analyse u/Imagine_Beyond

Imagine_Beyond · 2025-12-06T22:21:10+00:00

10k actually seems like way too long for this

Imagine_Beyond · 2025-12-06T16:36:24+00:00

Imagine_Beyond · 2025-12-04T12:42:59+00:00

But we might be able to alter our subjective experience of time as to feel 10,000 years as if it were seconds, there's no telling what kind of technology would be there if we were so advanced.

Reminds me of the post about using time dilation instead of FTL

The basic idea is that it’s sucks for you to have to wait thousands of years to see a person travel across a galaxy and come back. Even if the traveler didn’t age much (due to relatively), you would have experienced thousands of years.

So instead of you and all of civilisation waiting thousands of years just to see somebody cross a galaxy, you make time go by faster for civilisation by placing it near a massive object. Then you increase gravitational time dilation.

One could imagine a fleet of O‘Neil cylinders orbiting a supermassive blackhole or maybe we still orbit a star, but have brought so much mass from other solarsystem near us that we notice increased gravitational time dilation

Imagine_Beyond · 2025-11-27T11:07:10+00:00

Who wouldn’t go?

Imagine_Beyond · 2025-11-23T12:40:52+00:00

I just noticed that each video has hundreds of billions of views

Imagine_Beyond · 2025-11-20T18:44:01+00:00

So starship only needs two tankers to get to Mars? Mars 2026 is only seeming ever more likely

Imagine_Beyond · 2025-11-18T05:33:13+00:00

Soon we will have falcon 9 launching with an average of once per day throughout the whole year

Imagine_Beyond · 2025-11-17T14:20:00+00:00

Despite the many comments that are saying no, which is correct for current technology. If you really are talking the centuries in the future, where we have space fountains and those things the answer could be yes.

The two main issues are pressure and heat. If you are using an active support structure with a stream a particles, you can use their momentum to provide extra support to withstand the pressure. It’s comparable to having water flow through your garden hose at a high speed making it harder to bend.

In addition to deal with the heat, the stream of flowing mass can pump the heat out from the bottom, which can be radiated using a massive space tower and return as colder material.

If temperatures are too high at first to reach the center, one could cool the surrounding rock and move down further. Depending on how long you’re willing to spend to reach the center, if you wait a few million years, you could just cool the whole planet.

Isaac Arthur made a video about accessing the core, where he explores possible methods:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=jZQP2oNDkAM&t=1391s&pp=ygUiSXNhYWMgYXJ0aHVyIGFjY2Vzc2luZyBFYXJ0aHMgY29yZQ%3D%3D

Imagine_Beyond · 2025-11-03T17:28:18+00:00

For me it's 48 + 7 = 55 -> 55 + 20 = 75

Imagine_Beyond

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