If a large object, the size of 3 story building was launched into space?

Question

and allowed to float just outside earth's atmostphere...10 or so miles away, how would it move relative to the earth?

Also if such an object were equipped with some sort of burn resistant rope or fiber that dangled down through the atmosphere and would the rope remain stationary as seen from the earth's surface?

Answer 1

supposedly it gains a bit of speed in orbit, terminal velocity I suppose, but your rope idea has already been in design phases.

yes 21747 miles long built with statically pulled carbon nano tubes.

still a work in progress though.

the object in space will have to stabilize a geosynchronous
orbit much like many satellites in orbit today.

the call it the space elevator and is supposed to be pushed upwards by powerful lazers

http://www.space.com/businesstechnology/technology/elevator_update_020819.html

Answer 2

For starters, the size of the object doesn't matter. Given an altitude and a velocity, any object will follow the same orbit, be it a speck of dust, a bowling ball, or the Eiffel Tower. The mass of the object determines how much energy it will take to achieve this particular orbit.

The rope or fiber dangled towards the Earth would orbit the Earth faster and faster as it lengthened. (higher orbits go slower, so the lower the string's center of mass went, the faster it would orbit, taking it ahead of the space building). Furthermore, if this were dipped into the atmosphere, it would bring the entire thing down - guaranteed - unless the flying space building also had thrusters to counteract the drag.

That burn that you're resisting with this special fiber - guess where the energy for that burn comes from - the kinetic energy of the object. So it's litterally burning off speed - which in turn lowers the orbit (reducing energy lowers the orbit) until the whole space building re-enters. Too bad building codes don't allow asbestos insulation anymore - you'd need it then!

But to answer your question, no, from an object orbiting just 10 miles above the atmosphere, anything dangling down through the atmosphere would be flying very very fast indeed - not stationary at all.

If you wanted a stationary, dangling cord from an object in space, the object would have to be at least 22,240 miles above the equator - geostationary orbit. The edge of space is considered to be about 62.1 miles - so your 72.1 mile high flying 3-story-building-sized object would have to be going very quickly around the Earth in order to stay up there.

Answer 3

The space shuttle is 37 meters long, about the same as a 11 story building. Ten miles up from the ground is not outer space -- there are airplanes that fly that high -- so I'm going to assume you mean 10 miles outside the atmosphere. But ... the atmosphere doesn't have a sharp limit, it just gradually gets thinner and thinner as you go up. So lets use the shuttle orbit height, which is typically about 350 km.

The shuttle speed in orbit is about 25,900 km/h. Any rope that dangled down from it would also be moving at that speed. The part of the rope in the atmosphere would be moving at about 70 or 80 times the speed of sound. Air friction would make it red-hot! (Just like the bottom of the shuttle gets red hot when it comes back down.)

Answer 4

Nothing can just float up there. In order to orbit, you have to be travelling at vast speed (8 kms/sec for ISS) to counter the Earth’s gravity.

The reason you think that you can just float is that TV shots of space walkers at ISS seem to show that the space station is just floating. In fact it is moving around the Earth in little over an hour.

Some satellites stay over the same spot on Earth – that is because they are in geosynchronous orbit. There is a point at 22,000 mile above the Earth that a satellite can orbit in one day. It has to be travelling very fast to do this, but it means it stays over the same part of Earth (because the Earth rotates in a day – believe it or not). It is definitely not stationary, as you would think.

But a rope from 22000 miles???? Not really.

Also, note that the Saturn V rocket that launched the lunar astronauts was over 30 stories tall.