Firstly the space elevator. There is a way this could become viable a lot sooner than twiddling our thumbs for viable industrialization of carbon nanotube tech - and it isn't anything new. Ask your self, if this “cable” only had to stretch for a few hundred metres, or even KM's would it be practical. Yes. Now ask yourself, how do boats work? Now ask yourself, what is the pressure difference between the vacuum of space and the outer atmosphere? Or even the outer and inner atmosphere for that matter. What would happen if we constructed from space something like a giant boat hull. That used the atmosphere as the water, and the vacuum of space as the displacement? Hello sky hook. You could even make it open ended like a boat. Be big tho! Now we hang our little cable off this starting point, and maybe even also put the current counter weight idea in - now we have a sling shot, hello cheap deep space launches. Now we work down our cable from this boat into the atmosphere, from the vacuum of space we start building “balloons” except they are filled with “vacuum” which makes them high efficiency. If constructed in a vacuum we make these a lot cheaper to make. We string these periodically down our elevator cable to distribute the weight, they would have to be big, and probably ring shaped - but each one only needs to hold about a ton or more of weight - which even hydrogen balloons could deal with. Now tell me, if you were a government with heaps of money to throw - how simple does this sound? With global cooperation we could knock one of these up in a decade or so.
— Overlord PhoenixX 2010/03/06 04:11