How much would a space elevator cost to build and how long would it take?

[silverpig]

Originally posted by: JTsyo
The actual elevator wouldn't be like what you see in a building. It would be something that can ride on the line(s) that are anchored between the ground and a station in space. Geo-sycn orbits are around 400 miles I believe. While a space elevator offers cheap transportation to space I don't think we're near the need for it. What we need now is a cheaper space shuttle.

geosync is like 40 000 km...

 

[silverpig]

Originally posted by: BrownTown
I think it would be ~300 Billion dollars, but the point is its COMPLETELY WORTHLESS. We have no good reason whatsoever to be in space other than dick waving, and we can do that just fine here on earth by invading other countries and stuff.

Also, apparently most people here don't get the basic idea behind the elevator, its not a building we build UP to space, its a rope connecting between earth and a space station. The elevator is not under compression it is under tension. Imagine swinging a bucket of water around in a circle connected to a string. Thats the whole idea behind the thing, the only problem is getting a rope string enough (and long enough) to stretch from the earth all the way up to space. IF you know anything about how much it costs to launch payloads into space you will say that a gigantic rope miles long and a foot thick will cost tens or hundreds of billions to launch into space even IF we had a strong enough material to make it out of.

Originally posted by: sandorski
Stuff! Hehe, at the moment, mostly just Satellites, but a Space Elevator would make Moon or other Planet Colonization much more viable by reducing the Cost of getting Stuff into Space.

See the problem is that a moon colony would weight LESS than the elevator itself so it would be cheaper to just launch it all with rockets than building the elevator. A space elevator only becomes economical at some point where you have a need to launch thousands of tons into orbit every year and that is still at least 100 years off.

The part under tension isn't the part connected to the earth, it's the part at geosync.