UniverseWatcher
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‘Tether’ and ‘skyhook’ are occasionally used interchangeably in the literature (and sources referenced here), and authors each have their own definitions for these terms which vary with the proposed design. Some authors use ‘tether’ and ‘skyhook’ to refer exclusively to components of the launch system, i.e. the long cable and end-points for spacecraft attachment respectively. Others use ‘tether’ to refer to nonrotating designs and ‘skyhook’ to refer to rotating designs and their variants. ‘Skyhook’ is also used to describe nonrotating variants, and in certain cases, variants with carefully chosen rotations which could be stationary in an appropriately chosen reference frames. Ultimately, this technology is an exploratory phase and lacks rigorous definition of terms, and care should be taken to notice how exactly these terms are being used by any given author.