Easily the most expensive aspect of this operation will be the creation of the Geosynchronous Orbiting Space Station (GOSS).
This is the top floor of the elevator and will effectively be the weightless mooring from which the construction of the entire network will begin. It would be almost impossible to build the elevator’s tether from the ground up. The only practical way to construct it is to build it in orbit and feed it back down toward the Earth’s surface.
There are two ways to build the GOSS.
The first is relatively simple. We just ship everything necessary up on the back of rockets. Easy as this sounds we’re talking potentially thousands of tons of mass in order to achieve this and the base ratio for fuel to mass in order to achieve orbit is 10:1.
That means for every ton of equipment & people to be lifted we need to burn 10 tonnes of fossil fuels.
This might be technically doable but the environmental cost will need to be considered very carefully and it’s highly likely that it will not be worth the risk.
The second option is to identify a suitable candidate in the asteroid belt and attach a propulsion unit to it. We can then nudge the asteroid back towards our planet and park it the necessary orbit above our Earth Base.
This is technically a more difficult proposition but the bulk of the operation would be done remotely using robotics and the payoff would be potentially enormous.
The asteroid we use would be selected based on the materials it contains and how useful they would be in constructing the space station and tether. By doing this we would shortcut our way to having the ingredients necessary right where we need them – already in orbit.
This whole aspect of the project is for the big brains and we need to get them on board first.
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