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Comment by DigitalHackOp | Hacker News Reader

Not even close. They optimized for strength-to-weight ratios, which is great for a ton of things, but a space elevator needs insane levels of brute strength. Were not sure the material can exist in our current understanding of physics

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Don't forget that space elevators need more than brute strength: they need to be immune to all sorts of cosmic radiation and space debris, they presumably need to be electrically conductive since the elevator carriage will need a lot of power to travel upwards a few thousand KMs before their passengers starve to death, they need to be robust against the elevator carriage's friction, and probably a few other things.

> they presumably need to be electrically conductive since the elevator carriage will need a lot of power to travel upwards a few thousand KMs before their passengers starve to death

Even a slow space elevator that can only be used for transporting cargo would already be extremely useful. You could even load it with a container filled with life support if you really need to ship living cargo.

An orbit to ground space elevator would indeed be challenging, but the cable doesn't have to go all the way to the ground to be useful. Shorter tethers have many applications, and those can be made out of non-exotic materials (e.g. Kevlar).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_tether

There are still challenges, of course.

"Great for a ton of things" heh

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