Everything is politics, including NASA... its about the $...

[Jacob Edward]

In terms of the federal budget I've said a few times I'd like to invert the percentages for NASA and the military
Right now the military is very bloated, inverting would still give them some budget to use in order to grease the wheels while scaling down
If there was ever any real conflict that they dont already have everything they would need, they could request help from NASA...
Its ALWAYS about who gets the $

Of course Musk embarrassed NASA (or exposed some shadow thing... wheres all the $) with his reusable rockets...
50 million $ rocket only costs 200k $ in fuel to get to space...
The narrative is that NASA would continually make 50 million $ rockets, use them once and then make another
Do you believe that?

A question I've been pondering was if a space elevator was a good idea... pretty sure it would need to be a water elevator where you float things to the top, sandbags and 3d printing concrete and I bet that would be possible... lots of details, I feel like absorbing the energy on the way down is worth it, if you could spiral the tower and absorb with motors... anyways that sounds like way too much guesswork right?

Another question I was asking myself is if Branson and Virgin Galactic have the right idea, if he can get something as small as a jet to no gravity... doesn't it get easier once you get rid of the gravity? He just needs to start landing them in orbiting stations to refuel and go back to earth... idk, anybody have any important detail I'm not considering? it has the reusability and it fits with the other infrastructure and blablabla... Can a jet not be "electric"? Solar in space is suppose to be the gold standard right?

[Jacob Edward]

Thinking about the problem and doing more reading, other people thought it would be more practical to have something like a rope you climb (hilarious how the wikipedia shows it as just one rope instead of it being two that rotated at both ends... momentum downwards propels it upwards etc.  Idk... I would be very paranoid about the rope breaking and the argument that miles of construction is out of range for modern robotics... sure it would take some time, civilization is thousands of years old... I'd imagine inbetween here and there the cable could contribute but the idea is you would want to continually build upwards... maybe instead of spiraling downwards you would send stuff down on cable lines that would absorb the energy and send everything up via floating... that would let you set cable supports to adjacent towers etc.  

Virgin Galactic has their thing take off at 50k feet, maybe just building up until 9 miles and launching everything from there?