I’ve heard this subject talked about a few times in my time working in satellite communications systems manufacture, and also in academia, and have spent a little time dreaming about it myself.

I don’t see any technical reason why it couldn’t be done, assuming a suitable tethering solution could be found.

The remote station would need to be somewhere beyond geostationary orbit, which from memory is around 44,000 km away, so maybe a little too much to commute daily ☺

The tethering site would need to be at some point on the equator. LEO objects have no need to follow a path around the equator, so could be managed in a way that avoids collision with the tether. I think there could also be ways to put recovery systems in place, in case of accident. Would we still even need a manned ISS with this in place? Probably not.

I would love to see it, and other seemingly far fetched ambitious space projects like it kick-off.

Unfortunately, since we seem to have diverged from the path of doing what is best for humanity, towards simply just making a profit, projects like this seem to be becoming less and less likely to obtain funding.

There are projects around trying to change that, to provide an alternative way of doing things, by way of infrastructure systems re-purposed from being profit driven, that might one day put crowd driven super-budgets for things like this back on the table.

My own VRENAR project is one of those. I’ve found virtually zero funding for it in several years working on it. Maybe connecting it as an enabler of more inspiring projects like space elevators would make a difference. Who knows. Time will tell.

Thanks for posting. Never stop dreaming! The best projects are causes for humanity that will never die, until the cause is met.