Most of you are probably familiar with the obstacles preventing the construction of an Earth-based space elevator anytime soon. Space entrepreneur Michael Laine was among those striving to make it happen via his company LiftPort in the early 2000s, though those efforts ultimately failed.
Nonetheless, LiftPort was back at it last summer, attacking the problem from a different direction. They ran a high-profile and wildly successful Kickstarter campaign to fund their first steps toward building a lunar elevator, which turns out to be a lot easier. In fact, the projected final costs would only be $800 million. All things considered, this strikes us as a good bargain, especially when compared to, say, the breathtaking price of expanding rail capacity under the Hudson River.
We're reminded here of one of our favorite passages from the script for ELE↓↑TOR:
ELIJAH OTIS [gasping and coughing horribly]: They spanned the continent with rail--but still they encountered the water. We might populate the seas in vast submersibles--and despair nonetheless when we reach the ocean floor. But the cosmos: the cosmos is infinite--and it is on that firmament we must inscribe our impossible destiny. Ever upward, ever outward--we approach the boundary of some as yet unimagined asymptote. All this was foretold to me twenty years ago--in Oswego, New York, by an ancient Mohegan witch-woman.