Bye bye Space Elevator

I've read the paper, and I'm not clear he's right though. It critically
depends on whether the assumptions behind the maths apply to all possible
space elevators (as in he might be right for the current design, but is it
possible to redesign it to avoid the problems he's found?)

At one point he mentions some sort of characteristic crack length which is a
kilometer for an object as big as a space elevator.

My reading of this is that a hoy tether construction such that the redundant
legs are longer than 1 kilometer would probably survive, so his maths would
not be correct.

(Hoy tethers are interesting because they have built in redundancy to
failure, so a single failure, like a crack can't propagate to failure of the
entire structure, unlike normal monolithic structures that his maths was
designed for.)

--
-Ian Woollard

"Gravity is just a theory. We shouldn't be teaching it to children as if
were fact."
"The NSA would like to remind everyone to call their mothers this Sunday.
They need to calibrate their system."