"Forget the roar of rocketry and those bone jarring liftoffs, the elevator would be a smooth 62,000-mile (100,000-kilometer) ride up a long cable. Payloads can shimmy up the Earth-to-space cable, experiencing no large launch forces, slowly climbing from one atmosphere to a vacuum.

Earth orbit, the Moon, Mars, Venus, the asteroids and beyond - they are routinely accessible via the space elevator. And for all its promise and grandeur, this mega-project is made practical by the tiniest of technologies - carbon nanotubes."

http://www.space.com/businesstechnology/technology/space_elevator_020327-1.html

This article is from 2002. Is this for real?

Sincerely,

The speculation is certainly for real, whether the project ever will be is another matter.

Space elevators have been talked about for years. I think it may have been Arthur C. Clarke who first posited the idea.

One of the problems (apart from the engineering which is currently out of our league) is the likely cost/benefit analysis, which doesn't make sense at this time. Perhaps if they discover oil (or politically unsavoury regimes) among the asteroids it will be fast-tracked.

Buncha crap. Even if you had a material with sufficient tensile strength to support its own weight as a straight line beanstalk, it wouldn't work.

1) The minimum energy curve to geosynchronous orbit is not nearly a straight line. The only part of the beanstalk in equilibrium orbit is its distal end.

2) No vertical runs of electrical conductors are allowed. A conductor cutting through the magnetosphere at even modest velocities is a BAD THING re Lenz' Law. Shorting the atmosphere to ground is a BAD THING.

3) What will power the elevator? 23,500 miles at 100 mph is 10 days of travel. No long vertical wires are allowed.

4) What will you use as radiation shielding as you pass through the van Allen radiation belts? Shielding is is dead weight.

5) What will protect the beanstalk itself against van Allen radiation degradation and solar hard UV? Progressive material degradation or extra weight from shielding instantly dooms any beanstalk.

6) How much lofted stuff are we talking? A pissy little pound/foot is 62,000 tons. The Space Scuttle has a real world net payload of 20 tons. 3100 launches? That is a direct transportation cost of $(US)1.7 trillion, plus overhead. The cost of the stuff itself, plus labor and health insurance, is extra.

Uncle maybe you should go? http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/2188107.stm