Space Elevators

In his book book "After the Software Wars", Keith Curtis advocates the development of the space elevator.  What about a space elevator?  There isn't much doubt that this would be much preferred over chemical rockets. The trouble, I think, is that it too exotic at this time.  It would require mastery of a materials that aren't quite well understood as of yet.  Certainly, the use of chemical rockets must seem pretty old fashioned by now.  But it is the only proven way to get to space.  To discontinue the use of rockets first, then switching priorities to space elevators would seem to be premature.  My opinion of course.

Not to defend chemical rockets here, but the really bad thing about how this has been done is the fact that so much mass gets wasted.  The shuttle was supposed to solve this issue, but the design was flawed in that sense.  Or to put it another way, if the purpose was to save mass, it failed because the design was not geared toward saving mass in the way that counted.  Inasmuch as most of the mass is fuel, that part cannot be saved unless the number of launches is minimized.  The amount of mass that goes up must be minimized as well as the amount that you have to bring back.  This is where the shuttle failed.  In trying to construct a system that could land, you have to bring back too much mass.  This takes from payload.  What you end up doing is burning a lot of fuel just to get your vehicle up and back down again.  You need to put a lot of payload up there and keep it up there.  Bringing it back only means you have to climb the gravity well again.

A good solution is a one and your done launch.  The shuttle design was good in that the shuttle could be used over and over.  But it needed to be kept in space.   When the astronauts and/or cargo had to return to earth, just do it the same way as in Apollo.  Just use relatively small capsules to come back.  Not bring a large vehicle back.  Use that vehicle in space to go places.  Maybe even back to the moon.  Or to Mars.  It is silly
to keep launching it again and again from the earth.

Therefore, a radically new launch system really isn't necessary.  We just need to use what we got in a more effective manner.  A shuttle derived system, which was considered by the Augustine commission, could've possibly been set to reuse its big engines.  Or could it?  Try to imagine refueling one of those big rockets in space.  If that could be done, you have a lot of rocket capability up there.  But the commission really didn't go into that.  The refueling would take place with a much smaller craft.  Too bad.    It would reduce the number of launches to move things if you had that much power potential in one rocket already situated in space.

Space elevators would be great.  But chemical rockets didn't have to be this bad.