orbital tower n.

If a physical connection could be made between the geostationary satellite and the ground, it would allow vertical ascent by powered capsules up this ‘orbital tower’ directly into geostationary orbit.

Whatever problems might still lie ahead, no one doubted now that the Orbital Tower was an idea whose time had come.

For the very first time the construction of the proposed Orbital Tower gives us a chance of establishing fixed observatories in the ionosphere.

At last we can build the Space Elevator—or the Orbital Tower, as I prefer to call it. For in a sense it is a tower, rising clear through the atmosphere, and far, far beyond…

It was Artsutanov who proposed that if one were to position a satellite in geostationary orbit right over a planet’s equator, and hang a cable thirty-six thousand kilometres long from it, the whole lash-up would amount to an ‘orbital tower’.