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I remember reading about this at the time. As a 15 year old obsessed with Nikola Tesla, I thought it was the coolest thing in the world. A 20km tether that generated electricity using the Earth’s magnetic field as a dynamo? Wow.
“NASA has conducted several experiments with Plasma Motor Generator (PMG) tethers in space. An early experiment used a 500-meter conducting tether. In 1996, NASA conducted an experiment with a 20,000-meter conducting tether. When the tether was fully deployed during this test, the orbiting tether generated a potential of 3,500 volts. This conducting single-line tether was severed after five hours of deployment. It is believed that the failure was caused by an electric arc generated by the conductive tether's movement through the Earth's magnetic field.“
You are trading IIRC height or speed for the energy you "pump" out of the electrodynamic tether. So it's not a pure power source, but you can use it to maneuver in Earth's magnetic field without using propelant, with energy from solar panels.
Or possibly you can use it as a battery, "dragging" something up with solar power, then converting that potential energy back to electricity. :)
I can't recall if it was NASA or Tethers Unlimited that proposed using solar power to boost a tether into a higher orbit to offset some of the momentum transfer.
Since we aren't spending a lot of time on these systems, I'm guessing they've discovered how impressively complicated it is to do a 4 dimensional rendezvous. It's hard enough in orbital mechanics to hit a 'stationary' object, and now you're going to spin it end over end...
the superior way of accelerating/decelerating stuff in space. if you are fascinated by this mode of propulsion email me at halvor@solstorm.io. we are hiring