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Tango...

I like the idea, but this is where the Earth-based space elevator has
a huge advantage: it can easily bootstrap itself to a higher capacity,
by pulling up more of itself and growing. It's a lot harder to do with
your design; hence the initial huge launch mass (15,000 tons). Anything
that costs $50 billion plus for unproven benefit is basically a nonstarter.

Are you familiar with the tether work by Bob Hoyt and the people at
"Tethers Unlimited"? See http://www.tethers.com/ - they seem to have
pretty much all these bases already covered. One example I found was a
25 ton tether design for moving things form LEO to GTO or Lunar transfer
orbit. There's also a "Hypersonic Airplane Space Tether Orbital Launch
(HASTOL)" paper that indicates they could have tethers that weigh just a
few times a launch payload, even using current materials, so I don't
know why your design requires so much mass.

Arthur Smith (apsmith@...