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

Re:location, location, location...

[American AC in Paris]

That means that in order to be harmless, it'd have to be built out in the middle of the sea. They're actually seriously suggesting they use a ship/platform as the base.

Or, y'know, a small island. Assuming they can find a small island in the middle of the ocean.

If it's so goddamn far from everything else, it's not going to make for a very efficient means of getting stuff from "civilization" to space, now is it?

Wait a minute. You think shipping goods an extra few hundred kilometers via container ship is somehow economically prohibitive? It's obscenely inexpensive and easy to ship goods by sea. It's the getting it to space part that's tricky.

They're entirely serious when they say, "Oh, we won't have to worry about the part that doesn't fly off into orbit, because we'll put it in the middle of the ocean." Right. That doesn't create its own problems, no, not at all.

Of course it creates its own problems. Namely, that we'd need to restrict air and sea traffic in a certain area, we'd need to find a suitable island for the project, and we'd need to create a special shipping lane for spacebound cargo. You seem to view these problems as showstoppers; I don't really see anything prohibitively challenging about the examples you cite.

When will you people get it through your heads that space elevators won't work?

Probably never. Then again, odds are I'm too dense to see the nuanced wisdom in your above statements, and my responses are all hideously naive.