At 74km/h you would reach space (100km karman line) in an hour and a half but you would need to keep going for another 20 days at that speed reach geostationary orbit in order to not fall back to earth when you exit the space elevator.
Wikipedia has an article that touches on this here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_elevator_safety
Maybe for cargo the 20 days are not really important
80% of the energy in a rocket goes to adding sideways motion.
An elevator upto GEO adds enough energy (taken from the earths rotational energy) to your payload to get it into orbit. If you let go lower down you need to add sideways velocity.
In LEO you on an elevator would be travelling about 1,400mph and need to get to 18,000 to get into orbit. Sure there’s no atmosphere to work against but it’s still a lot of fuel to use in a rocket.
I have not researched this at all, so I'm not doubting you, but doesn't most of the energy go into accelerating the remaining fuel? So, by the rocket equation, shouldn't you be way ahead of the game by starting at the edge of space?
There is an excellent What-if on this: https://web.archive.org/web/20230211050159/https://what-if.x...
That's a pretty significant speed already and it helps that you are already in space. See how tiny a Pegasus rocket is, and that one is launched from aircraft, slower, and nowhere near as high as what we are discussing.
https://www.northropgrumman.com/space/pegasus-rocket/
Getting to 100km from ground requires beefy first (even second) stages because you need to accelerate further stages plus the fuel, inside the atmosphere. We can basically pretend we are starting at the second or third stages. It now up to the rocket equation.
So, to recap, there's already 1400mph of sideways motion, at a negligible air resistance, 100 to 200km up with vacuum optimized nozzles. It is a massive win.
The question is if we could hoist what are still relatively heavy payloads.
(Haven’t done the exact maths, I suspect the delta is even closer than 300moh)
Rockets will have abandoned solid fuel boosters long before then.
Satellites and space stations are always in free fall. The thing that keeps them in "space" is the velocity with which they were originally launched to orbit the Earth as centripetal force becomes the weight of the satellite, which slows down such falling process. Seeing it with cold eyes, they employ all the energy at a first for to lift the weight of that falling object.
If a geostationary satellite has to stay over the same region of the planet, it has to be sent much much far away, until its orbital velocity become synchronized with the Earth's rotation. And even like that, keeps being in free fall due Earth's gravity.
I mean, what we see in cartoons or sci-movies about to send a rocket absolutely vertical and cut engines, or a spaceship joining over a planet and conserve the same orbital position, could be done only with anti-gravitational engines. A small liquid fuel could not maintain them in place.
It would be more clear to say that what keeps them in space is that they're moving sideways so fast.
Velocity, not acceleration, is the right term here.