Yes! Mining the Sky was an amazing book. http://www.amazon.com/Mining-Sky-Untold-Asteroids-Planets/dp...

$700 b is not nearly enough to make a space elevator with existing technology; you're off by about a factor of 1000.

Of course, if you're willing to wait ten years for the cost to produce carbon nanotubes to drop...

Actually my brother and a good friend recently attended a conference on the subject, and I'm not pulling numbers out of the air. Clearly there is room for dispute, but between 10B and 1000B is a most reasonable range. I also disagree in principle that anything could cost $700T dollars. Are you telling me that the whole of the US working for 50 years couldn't build it? Because US GDP is ~$14T.

Also, you don't launch a company and next year make an elevator. There is a lot of tech to develop. You don't just sit on that tech. Materials made cheap enough to build a earth bound tether would have plenty of other applications. As would the automated or teleoperated construction robots.

Also, the first elevator on the moon wouldn't require much innovation in materials at all.

But I do have a very armchair understanding of the topic.

In spring of 2005 I did a back of the envelope calculation on the total cost to produce the mass of carbon nanotubes needed for an elevator with cross-section of 1 cm^2 using the methods available then and got a result of about 1.25 quadrillion dollars--a sum truly large enough to be meaningless. It appears there have been several significant advances since then, including the revision of the intended cross-sectional area downward, and improvements in the production costs.

And my estimate on costs was precisely in the vein of "next year make an elevator"--I do not doubt that there will be a space elevator long before the next 50 years pass, I merely doubt that $700b is sufficient that a feasible short term effort could be made.

A lunar elevator, while a nice proof of concept for a terrestrial space elevator, has two major problems: (1) There isn't really a point; the moon's gravity well is too weak for it to be worth it to construct an elevator any time soon. (2) Getting the material there without an existing terrestrial space elevator (and possibly even with one) is a prohibitively expensive exercise.

Research into the construction of a space elevator is a worthwhile pursuit likely to result in many useful technological advances. But $700b is not enough to construct one in the short term from existing technology, and is too much to be usefully applied to further research.

I think you're thinking like NASA. I'm thinking like a startup founder.

  construction of a space elevator is a worthwhile pursuit likely to result in many useful technological advance

Exactly! Monetize that shit, and feed it back into the pool. I think we're on the same page that getting it out in a year is ridiculous.

Also, a lunar elevator might not be the best choice. Perhaps a mass driver or sky hook on the moon would be better. I would still start on the moon before constructing the first inch of tether around earth.

I would agree - and combine solar panels on the moon that is beamed back to earth.

Ideally if you could figure out how to build a factory on the moon to mine and produce the first wave of robots/solar power too.

I would probably build a moon elevator first to get the materials to build the earth elevator. One of the most important things to mine is materials for power generation. Solar in some form or another, for sure.

Wow I was thinking the exact same thing. Put the money into an Apollo-scale project to perfect the 1st gen space elevator. Most of the money would go to research. The price of building it once you have the know-how is a trivially small amount of the total $700 billion.

You mentioned Apollo, others mentioned the space shuttle.

NASA is a horrible organization to actually get things done. I wouldn't emulate them. Burt Rutan is a hero.

Yeah, cause every other space agency actually got off their asses and put men on the moon, deployed and operated a space lab, deployed and operated a largely reuseable launch vehicle that hardly ever blows up, drove rc cars around mars for months, etc.

Going to the moon was a horrible idea. It was a very poor use of resources. That's why we haven't been back in 40 years.

The Mars rovers are the exception the proves the rule. Operational for years after a few hundred million dollars spent, while each shuttle mission eats over $1B.

Any reasonable manager would have scrapped the shuttle long ago.

The reason NASA does more is that we have more money than others, not because they are better.

The goal after all is long term benefit to the human race (or profit). Nasa hasn't done all that much towards that end. If anything, they were a good excuse to design ICBMs.

A hero that has not even reached orbit yet.

Given the $1B spent on each shuttle launch, I'm sure he could make it.