The Space Elevator - Public or Private?

AtomicGoat writes "The Space Review reports that a Space Elevator may not get built without help from the U.S. Government, but the notion that 'the DoD can also provide a sense of fiscal discipline when dealing with large, expensive programs' sounds like an Onion story. Right now a small private company (Liftport), not NASA or the Air Force, is in the lead on revolutionary space travel."

Comments

"May not get built without help from U.S. Gov..."

[xxxJonBoyxxx]

"May not get built without help from U.S. Gov..."

Of course it needs government support; you can't just put up an X-mile high tower without worrying about security, shared land use, population relocation, etc. These are all things that government does. Without some government muscle, a private space elevator company would be sunk.

Governments will be involved

[Lord Grey]

Whether the funding for a space elevator comes from the private or public sector, governments from all around the world will surely be involved. Why? Because the damn thing is so tall. One reference I picked off the 'net says it would extend 62,000 miles.

That's a little over twice around the planet, people. Anyone who considers disaster scenarios should think about that. If something goes wrong, there's a possibility that the elevator cable would wrap itself around Earth, hard. Countries under the cable's path probably wouldn't like that. Their governments would make a great deal of noise, just considering the possibility.

Given that the governments are involved to that extent anyway, it's natural to assume that they will also want to oversee construction and whatnot, just to make sure Things Are Done Right. Now, do you want a government with no stake in the elevator watchdogging the process, or one that does have a serious financial stake?

fiscal discipline

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, people may like to make jokes about $800 hammers,
but the DoD folks are utter geniuses of financial management when compared withother federal agencies such as the FAA
or NASA.

Re:"May not get built without help from U.S. Gov..

[orac2]

For the initial elevator ribbon deployment, you're talking about 2 spools massing about 20 tons each, but once you've got the initial ribbon up, you use the cheap, cheap, elevator itself to build up the ribbon, so you're not paying typical launch costs for the whole thing.

To get the initial spools and associated hardware up to GEO, Brad Edwards calculates (if an MPD engine is used for the LEO to GEO transfer) that the launch cost could come downn to about $1 billion for 4 Atlas 5 launches -- about twice the cost of a single shuttle mission.