Celestia Forums

The physics are simplistic and lots of factors are neglected but the site is still a little interesting if just for the animations. Perhaps we could use the last animation where the counterweight breaks off as a novel launch vehicle...

http://gassend.net/spaceelevator/breaks/index.html

Seeing it wrap around the earth like that one can't help but wonder what the death toll on the surface would be.

Its all depends but guesstimate I would stay maybe in the tens of thousands, and that is probably the high end. Even though the cable is coming down its not going to have a lot a sway as it wraps itself around the plant. I would be surprised if the crash zone was more then a kilometer wide.

Kim Stanley Robinson's novel [i]Red Mars[/i] has an interesting description of a space elevator collapsing onto Mars. You wouldn't want to be living anywhere near the equator...

The cable would fall away from the direction of rotation, whilst the top would stay in geostationary orbit, so a lot of damae could be avoided by simply building it on the west coast, also, the seer mass of the falling cable would cause it to fall in a short area relative to the cables actual length.