Reply #8: I would say 50 to 75 years is reasonable for a Space Elevator... [View All]

the latest in Materials technology has the potential to create materials that have the tensile strength necessary to keep a space elevator together, and take payloads. There are other problems, of course, but mostly in engineering and application.

However, we don't necessarily have to wait for a space elevator to be built before we begin utilizing resources in space. Even the space elevator will require a large mass to act as counterweight for it. This would most likely be an asteroid that will have to be captured and put in Earth orbit.

Frankly, the cost of actually capturing, for example, a near-Earth object isn't astronomical, even with current limitations in launching payloads. A mass driver wouldn't be more massive than most loads on the Space Shuttle, and would be more than capable of diverting an asteroid into Earth Orbit, for about the cost of deploying the any number of probes and such to asteroids already.