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Comment by coldtea | Hacker News Reader

>instead of building the elevator from the Earth’s surface (which is impossible with today’s technology), it would be anchored on the moon and stretch some 200,000 miles toward Earth until hitting the geostationary orbit height (about 22,236 miles above sea level)

Yeah, that's totally feasible and useful... /s

I hope those guys are not paid with public money...

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> I hope those guys are not paid with public money...

I hope they are.

Engineering feats like this propel us as a species forward. Imagine the material science involved in simply achieving the correct tensile strength. Every thought that goes into this will find application in other areas.

I can't imagine this will get built, especially not in our lifetimes, but I do hope that it is one of many such endeavors humans will embark upon.

>Engineering feats like this propel us as a species forward.

Note that there are no feats thus far...

What device did you type your comment on?

Probably specifically meant the purely theoretical (and devoid of any tangible engineering feat) paper

Not a space elevator or anything designed by the team in the article, I can assure you of that...

It's not like there can't be some research that's realistic and have tangible (even if remote) goals, like e.g. rocket research in the 20s and 30s, and some that's just theoretical filler -- and that we can never tell one from the other...

Without looking anything up, can you give an example of what material science advances have come out of NASA or other space programs, that have propelled us forward as a species?

> Without looking anything up

Not GP, but... what? Why are you filtering materials by the GP's in-brain knowledge?

There is the general-knowledge question I asked about space programs, and then the more personal question of whether someone has a familiarity with the subject or if they've adopted a talking point, perhaps as a side-effect of economic incentives much larger than themselves and their own lives. I think the personal question is at least as interesting as the general-knowledge one

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