And pls don't ask me about space elevators until someone at least builds a carbon nanotube structure longer than a footbridge
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 26, 2015Earth based Space elevators would be 62000 miles long. This about 2.5 times the 24,000 mile circumference of the earth.
At 200 kilometers per hour, a 30-passenger climber would be able to reach the GEO level after a 7.5 day trip. The climbing module would need to climb through Van Allen Radiation Belt for possibly days.
On February 13, 2006 the LiftPort Group announced that, earlier the same month, they had tested a mile of "space-elevator tether" made of carbon-fiber composite strings and fiberglass tape measuring 5 cm (2.0 in) wide and 1 mm (approx. 13 sheets of paper) thick, lifted with balloons. The carbon fiber was not strong enough for a real full blown earth based space elevator.
In 2007, Elevator:2010 held the 2007 Space Elevator games, which featured US$500,000 awards for each of the two competitions, (US$1,000,000 total) as well as an additional US$4,000,000 to be awarded over the next five years for space elevator related technologies. No teams won the competition, but a team from MIT entered the first 2-gram (0.07 oz), 100-percent carbon nanotube entry into the competition.
Liftport Group is working on a Lunar Space elevator to be deployed before 2020. This is technical feasible with materials available today. They have detailed plans on their approach. The issue is they can gather sufficient funding and operationally execute to deliver the plan.
Nextbigfuture covered the Space Elevator contests and has reported on various Space elevator and tether proposals. It would take a book to cover them all by collecting and updating hundreds of posts.
The Lunar Space Elevator Infrastructure is going to serve many purposes for the human race. The first and most obvious is the opening up of the Moon for tourism and colonization purposes. LSEI can be built with current materials, but it would not have a lot of throughput. The goal of the study would be to determine a method of increasing transport throughput to enable humans to go back to the Moon. LiftPort’s LSEI architecture provides consistent, safe, and high-volume lunar transportation. Each Ribbon attached to the lunar surface allows for an additional 260 kg of cargo. Built up over time, 5, 10 or 15 such Ribbons allows for human-rated heavy-cargo capacity. By building a complete, reusable, and expandable infrastructure, LSEI can send three astronauts to the lunar surface every four weeks. In addition, the LSEI expands the capabilities of the Deep Space Habitat envisioned by the Global Exploration Roadmap and endorsed by NASA. Accessing the Moon also means accessing the minerals of the Moon. The Moon’s suspected to possess a motherlode of helium3, which many (ourselves included) believe it could be used to energize nuclear fusion reactions and provide vast amounts of energy in a process which avoids the radioactive waste of nuclear fission (the process used in nuclear power on earth currently.)
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