Huge charges across long distances mean very large currents. That tends to create difficulties, such as massive heating.

Whether or not this will be the case I don't know, though experiments with simple long tethers (several km to 10s or 100s of km) should be relatively easy to test: try them in some empty space and instrument for charges and magnetic fields.

Might produce an interesting de-orbiting spectacle as well.

"The Space Tether Experiment"

> The space tether experiment, a joint venture of the US and Italy, called for a scientific payload--a large, spherical satellite--to be deployed from the US space shuttle at the end of a conducting cable (tether) 20 km (12.5 miles) long. The idea was to let the shuttle drag the tether across the Earth's magnetic field, producing one part of a dynamo circuit.

The experiment failed, for a fascinating reason...

I was vaguely aware that the experiment had been tried. I'd either forgotten or never known the specific reasons for the failure. Though it rather closely matches the scenario I'd suggested above.

Let's ignore that.

What if the cable attached to the moon and then locking the other end to earth orbit alters the month's orbit? There was some stuff I read that the moon doesn't neccesarily orbit the earth. It's the earth and moon orbit each other. Essentially our orbit is significantly affected by our moon compared to other planets and their moons. We have a ton of wildlife that depends on the current orbit pattern. Wouldn't this cable greatly alter said orbit?

Plus, 380,000km worth of material? Along with they just hand wave that all failure will happen on the moon side and never affect earth... um okay? Because of testing?

This seems more like a joke paper in all honesty. Kind of like the paper based on Silicon valley where they dev an algorithm to find out how long it would take to give an audience handjobs. d2f ratio

They don't handwave it, they calculate it. It's significantly less handwavy than your back-of-napkin objections.

Now let's do some basic arithmetic. Moon is about 10^22 kg. Saying it will move as a result is like worrying that a semi will stop because of a fly.

The cable in not in geosynchronous orbit, it's in geosynchronous altitude. If it is cut, it will fall into Earth.

I imagine it would be nailed down at the Moon, even though it 's going "up" on that end too, the Earth end will very likely weight much more than the Moon and pull the entire cable. But the fact that it must be much fatter near the Moon does indeed complicate things.

Only if it's extremely massive.

I think scrapping together enough material on earth to build this will be the first problem.

2.36 x10^8m for rough cylinder volume.

Steel weight would be 1,864,400,000,000 kg. Yes itd be a hybrid material. So, half of that? Maybe a quarter? That's not an insignificant amount of material at a 1m diameter cable. We haven't even gotten to labor costs and energy required.

I get astronomically, its insignificant. But I doubt it's going to have no effect.

That's 37,545,591,074 times your projected weight of the cable.

I would have assumed such measurements would deal exclusively with the moon's mass.

Are the two terms used interchangeably in this context? (honest question, I really have no idea)

Massive to a man, not a moon...

Sorry that's functionally just not possible. More so the moon is already moving away from the Earth at a couple centimeters per year. You're not even going to slow that down.