After work by Arthur C. Clarke in 1945, and after Russian work in 1960, Jerome Pearson at the U.S. Air Force Flight Dynamics Laboratory, Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, in Ohio published in Acta Astronautica, Vol. 2., pp. 785-799, by Pergamon Press in 1975 the results of his investigation on the theoretical possibility of constructing a tower to connect a geostationary satellite to the ground. The orbital tower could be built only by overcoming the three problems of buckling, strength, and dynamic stability. The buckling problem could be solved by building the tower outward from the geostationary point so that it remains balanced in tension and stabilized by the gravity gradient until the lower end touches the Earth and the upper end reaches 144,000 km altitude. The strength problem could be solved by tapering the cross-sectional area of the tower as an exponential function of the gravitational and inertial forces, from a maximum at the geostationary point to a minimum at the ends.
The strength requirements are extremely demanding, but the required strength-to-weight ratio is theoretically available in perfect-crystal whiskers of graphite. The dynamic stability is investigated and the tower is found to be stable under the vertical forces of lunar tidal excitations and under the lateral forces due to payloads moving along the tower. By recovering the excess energy of returning spacecraft, the tower would be able to launch other spacecraft into geostationary orbit with no power required other than frictional and conversion losses. By extracting energy from the Earth rotation, the orbital tower would be able to launch spacecraft without rockets from the geostationary orbit to reach all the planets or to escape the solar system.
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