Thread: Space Elevator ...... Going Up??

I don't think it'll happen.

Essentially the whole thing boils down to lowering the cost by two orders of magnitude and that's exactly what SpaceX is aiming to do as well, except that they are already executing a technologically feasible and economically sound plan to getting there and have made an enormous progress.

The materials to make the space elevator feasible do not even exist at present and the main issue is that the empirical properties of the real materials are many orders of magnitude off from the theoretical predictions. In other words we do not understand these materials very well which means that technological progress is very, very slow.

Once SpaceX gets there, they'll have the enormous advantage of the first mover and a competing technology would be hugely disadvantaged. Just like once the internal combustion engine got cars to mass market the electric cars got pretty much doomed despite being a much better technology.