Dumbwaiter to Heaven

Wait a second.

All we have to do is extrude a carbon nanotube filament and hang it on a geostationary satellite and POOF--space, the banal frontier: anyone who can climb is an astronaut?

Then where is friggin' Richard Branson with his checkbook? You'd think, with the hots he has for space tourism, he'd be all over anything that gets paying customers high.

Why am I suspicious that a technology this safe, cost-effective, and eminently feasible is gonna have to struggle for decades more against big rockets that go boom?

Is it just not sexy enough? 'Cause that's what it sounds like when you start rhapsodizing about the "majesty" or "inspiration" of rocket-fueled space flight. It's the same argument behind diverting money from cheap and productive robotic exploration of the solar system to slinging messy, resource-hogging humans into the void.

Rockets: sexy
Ropes: kinky, but not sexy

What's so sexy about liquid oxygen? Are you willing to keep risking life and limb on 1950s technology because it happens to be around and it still looks kinda cool?

How do we market something like this in a way that neutralizes the "magic beanstalk" factor? What if I told you it's laser-powered?

Yeah, that'll go over like the proverbial lead zeppelin.