The Apollo missions were planned so that they would simply ride around the back side of the moon and come back earthward, ~unless~ they did an insertion manuever.
Engineering, construction, and deplyoment will be easy (relatively speaking). It's convincing people that Sci-Fi can become Sci-Fact that is hard - judging by some of these threads.
Anything "dropped" from above ~13,000km-GEO will go into an elliptical orbit. At GEO, the object would be stationary, above GEO, all objects "dropped" will be flung off (to deep space, to the moon, to mars, etc).
When the ribbon is first lowered form orbit, it will be on the equator. After that, the anchor ship could move 100's (even 1000's with no lifters on it) of kilometers North or South. It will probably be doing a little of this anyway to evade space debris.
-IF- the elevator's ribbon was severed at GEO in a worst case scenario, two things would happen: Some of the ribbon would flutter down and make a long trail of cooperative ribbon to clean up (it would be like a super-strong trail of newsprint, essentially) or The upper ~30,000km would gain enough velocity to burn up in the atmosphere. Even if the whole thing did come down, it wouldn't break anything, we'd just have to cut it into sections and roll it up.
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The Apollo missions were planned so that they would simply ride around the back side of the moon and come back earthward, ~unless~ they did an insertion manuever.
Engineering, construction, and deplyoment will be easy (relatively speaking). It's convincing people that Sci-Fi can become Sci-Fact that is hard - judging by some of these threads.
Anything "dropped" from above ~13,000km-GEO will go into an elliptical orbit. At GEO, the object would be stationary, above GEO, all objects "dropped" will be flung off (to deep space, to the moon, to mars, etc).
When the ribbon is first lowered form orbit, it will be on the equator. After that, the anchor ship could move 100's (even 1000's with no lifters on it) of kilometers North or South. It will probably be doing a little of this anyway to evade space debris.
-IF- the elevator's ribbon was severed at GEO in a worst case scenario, two things would happen: Some of the ribbon would flutter down and make a long trail of cooperative ribbon to clean up (it would be like a super-strong trail of newsprint, essentially) or The upper ~30,000km would gain enough velocity to burn up in the atmosphere. Even if the whole thing did come down, it wouldn't break anything, we'd just have to cut it into sections and roll it up.