Completely off-topic, but what's the latest thinking on space-elevators? Is there any active research on them? I thought that carbon nanotubes or diamond nanothreads were likely candidates for the cable material.
We're decades off. You're asking about the state of supersonic air travel while researchers are still figuring out how to smelt aluminum.
If an elevator could provide more 9s of reliability, that could be huge.
And when we're talking about human spaceflight, consider the work SpaceX and Blue are putting into in-flight abort and propulsive landing - SpaceX's Crew Dragon should be much safer than the Space Shuttle, for example.
Propulsive landing helps for some failure modes but not all. Like I don't think it would have helped the CRS-7 failure had that been manned.
https://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2015/07/saving-spaceship-dra...
Once we have a rocket-powered transport network between, say, Earth-orbiting space stations, a moon colony, some near-Earth asteroid mines, fuel depots at lagrange points, a Phobos outpost and robotic factories on Mars, the economic payoff of a space elevator will be more immediate. Plus we could try them out on less massive bodies first, like the moon.
However orbital vertical tethers are doable with Zylon. A series of 3 orbital tethers could move stuff between LEO and the lunar neighborhood. http://hopsblog-hop.blogspot.com/2016/08/tran-cislunar-railr...
Both Musk and Bezos seem well on their way to reusable boosters. But reusable upper stages is another story.
An upper stage re-enters at around 8 km/s. An ~7 km/s delta V budget plus the need to carry a payload means a very slim dry mass fraction, an egg shell space craft.
Recovering and reusing upper stages will be much harder than reusing boosters.
The space elevator is an idea that sounds cool but is fucking dumb if you think about it for more than ten minutes, like the idea of accelerating ships to near light speed, when every hydrogen atom in the void will shred your hull like a cosmic ray.
Then even when the cable strength and length issues are satisfactorily resolved, there are lots of other logistics to deal with.
I think any future barriers to the elevator(s) will be more regulatory than technological in the future.
From the perspective of a hypothetical future in which all the technological problems have been solved, the barriers might be regulatory. But that seems tautological.
Which part of this is current tech?