25 years later, it seems just as far fetched.
Maybe you could have a HALO of THORNS (Telemetry homogeneous orbital restrainer nano-lattice stabilizer) - that have 13 satellite thrusters that can maintain the alignment of the nano-pillars... and have them sectionaly distributed as rings on the Z -- with tethered lattice of tubes tying it all together like a Chinese finger trap.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RnofCyaWhI0 <-- These things... https://i.imgur.com/O9eWZnH.jpeg
and the carbon lattice is also a fuel-capillary system - that feed like a live thing...
I’m probably overestimating the size of the anchor.
For a solid non-magnetic tether to be at all realistic, the tether material would likely be so light relative to it's length/volume, it'll never be at all dangerous regardless of how high you drop it from - its terminal velocity would be tiny.
I can drop some yarn, fishing line, whatever, from whichever height I want and it will never be dangerous to anything on the ground. Same principle.
I dont know about magnets, but I suppose the same applies here: If your tether isn't light, its own weight will add a stupid amount of stresses that would likely deform any load-bearing metal. Probably the magnets themselves in this case.
So possible 100s to thousands of tons falling for 5+ days…
If you have some thin wire design you could also consider just spooling it up as it drops, either at the base or with portable infrastructure you'll have plenty of time to deploy. If you do that you're just dealing with grams of material/second that you can deal with piecewise. Do this faster than terminal velocity and it'll land exactly where you want it to.
That part is not exactly an engineering challenge if you consider what other other stuff humanity likes to get up to with kilometers of much heavier cables and chains.
That is if your payload wasn't so high up, it's now on its way to an orbit around earth. I think physically the place of departure should be the periapsis of its orbit, so even with orbital decay through atmospheric drag you'll have long enough to figure where to steer it.
A longer elevator can fling you into the outer solar system. Just climb to the correct height, wait until the right phase angle, and let go.
In the first episode, a space elevator is bombed. It’s pretty catastrophic! I think a lot of people underestimate the forces involved in something of this scale collapsing.
“ The tether wrapped around the planet like a garrote.
It cut 50 levels down.”
This is obviously fiction, but so is this research and the general concept of space elevators.