More Words, Deeper Hole

I was sniping at the same kind of SPAAAAACE-centric thinking on Harlie Stross's blog earlier today. Many of the space elevator enthusiasts seem to think that demand for cheap access to space will drive development of strong enough/long enough carbon nanotubes (if indeed that's possible) to make a ground-to-GEO SE possible.

But there would be plenty of important, profitable, even revolutionary uses on earth even for CNT materials well short of SE requirements. So it's much more likely that those will drive (and pay for) most of the effort. In general, dogs wag tails rather than vice versa.