Why are Space Elevators not a horrible idea, as bad as gunpowder cannons to space?

[SomeGuy123]

It's my fairly well informed opinion that Space Elevators are a horrible, no good, very bad idea.

Now, there are details I don't know.  But I feel that the facts I do know are so damning to outweigh any positive element that could be proposed.  Here's what I think I know :

1.  The elevator cable has to be at least 35,786 kilometers long.  This means if there is a break anywhere on this cable, the entire apparatus is destroyed.

2.  The elevator cable has to somehow be launched from a rocket while unspooling in flight, and it needs to mass thousands of tons in total.  This means if it's lost, it will not be cheap to replace.  (I understand that the first rocket launches a "leader" cable that is reasonable in amss and then you would have to add additional cables to the bundle by having climbers carry them)

3.  The cable is under so much structural stress that the only proposed material that is plausible are extremely long carbon nanotubes and extremely strong bonding between the separate molecules to prevent them from delaminating.   Oh, and it needs to be flexible so you can spool it as well...It can't just meet the strength requirements, it has to be flexible, resistant to external wear, manufacturable for a cost you can afford, and have enough longevity to last decades...  It's one thing to ask material scientists for unobtanium.  It's another to ask for 5 more desirable characteristics when the first one is already just a hair less than impossible.

4.  Due to 4, you need 35,786 continuous kilometers made to near nanoscale perfection.  Any flaw could potentially result in a catastrophic failure.  There won't really be any other commercial use for elevator length cables, so you're talking about creating an entire industry of R&D and engineering and factories just to manufacture these things.  A product that has to be perfect costs exponentially more than a product that has a moderate acceptable failure rate.  This is why Xboxes cost a tiny fraction of the cost of the same capacity computer in a missile.  (and actually no missile has nearly that much processing power or memory)

5.  Currently, the entire energy of orbit flight is supposed to be beamed to the elevator cable using lasers on the ground.  Solar cells can only be so light, so the transit car crawls it's way up.  This is horrible for 2 reasons

       a.  An elevator represents an immense capital asset, probably hundreds of billions of dollars.  Yet since the cars can only crawl up over a period of days, it means you are not getting that much payload into orbit for your money per day.  Like any asset, it depreciates and the elevator will need to be replaced, so for it to be worth it, it needs to deliver more payload than the same money could buy in mass produced conventional rockets.  

      b.  The climber cars put mechanical wear on the cable surface.

6.  Even optimist economics of something like an elevator or laser launch are only cheap if there is large launch volume.  But space, as an economic endeavor, isn't profitable for large volumes.  Once you have enough communication satellites to saturate all the available RF spectrum, and enough spy and weather monitoring satellites to meet everyone's need, there isn't actually much market for space travel.  There is no evidence that low gravity manufacturing will ever be better than machines on earth.  Raw materials are too expensive to recover - retrieving enough platinum to pay for an asteroid redirect mission would crash the market price for platinum....(note I do think it will eventually be worth it, but you need self replicating machines so that you only need to launch a factory massing a few thousand tons and it then copies itself with asteroid or lunar mined material thereafter.  That is radically advanced technology of the future.  And, if you had self replicating machines, you still might not build elevators.  You could instead build an array of thousands of automated factories making big dumb boosters in parallel...)

7.  A space elevator, a national asset worth hundreds of billions of dollars, needs a single purposeful break to fail.  A single missile, launched by a rival nation state or terrorists, need only break it at a single point to cause it to snap.  Probably the pieces wouldn't be dangerous to people on the ground, but it's essentially a financial asset that is indefensible (it can't move or hide itself, missiles can be stealthed with radar absorbing materials so you can't see them incoming) that is trivial to destroy.  (a 1-10 million missile knocks out hundreds of billions of elevator cable)

If a missile sounds too unlikely, keep in mind a simple shaped charge against the cable is enough.  That in turn means security and near strip searches of anyone permitted near the cable, which reduces the economic value of it because of all these costs and delays...

Anyways, TLDR, I don't see why anyone ever wasted any time on the space elevator as a concept.  It fails the most basic analysis of feasibility.  There are other ways to reach space, and some of those ways could be potentially made very cheap with advanced technology.

Edited February 6, 2016 by SomeGuy123

[Green Baron]

Yes, as far as i see it it's just fiction, each attempt would collapse. Only one point of the cable is stationary (the one 36.000km up), the rest (below) wants to go ahead, parts farther out stay behind. So you either keep it under tension with some sort of engines or with a heavy part farther out, but these would tend to stay behind and so come down rather quickly .... or the weight has to be accelerated all the time. Am not sure wether it's possible to bring that whole thing in some sort of equilibrium

... i see the same problems with these Dysonsphere thingies: as long as we can't trick gravity it's just not possible. Only one orbit is stable, the rest must be kept in it's place. Imagine the weight of the part of such a sphere over the poles of a sun. Naaa ... won't work.

A ring world would theoretically be stable. But the slightest disturbance and things go wrong ...

 

Would be happy to be corrected though.

k

 

Another thing: the cable/weight/platform/whatever would sweep through all orbits around the equator (except GSO). Thou shalt not have other satellites before me ....

Edited February 6, 2016 by kemde
Bad english

[Rakaydos]

Space Elevators on earth are impractically difficult, but the potential savings are ridiculus. We're talking THOUSANDfold price reduction to get to orbit, which keeps people chasing the white elephant.

Now, EML1 and EML2 elevators, and mars elevators, are both entirely reasonable propositions, even with existing tech. the problem is that you need something on the order of 200 tons of kevlar just for the "pilot line", which would necessitate either in-space production of cable, or a launcher of MCT scale.

[Vanamonde]

Several of your objections assume that the structure would have a single spine of one sort of another. That is unlikely to be the case, for the reasons you cite. But the suspension bridges we're already been building for over a century weave many individual steel threads into massive cables, so that many individual elements could fail without the collapse of the entire structure. Some variation of this idea would probably be used on a space elevator. 

[Bill Phil]

12 minutes ago, Rakaydos said:

Space Elevators on earth are impractically difficult, but the potential savings are ridiculus. We're talking THOUSANDfold price reduction to get to orbit, which keeps people chasing the white elephant.

Now, EML1 and EML2 elevators, and mars elevators, are both entirely reasonable propositions, even with existing tech. the problem is that you need something on the order of 200 tons of kevlar just for the "pilot line", which would necessitate either in-space production of cable, or a launcher of MCT scale.

We need a genuine analysis into how much maintenance would cost.

Probably 10 billion a year, with every few years requiring a greater cost. It might reduce costs, but it's gonna take a century to amortize.

[tater]

Yeah, it's not a terrible idea, but it's a very impractical idea. If someone comes up with a better way to fabricate nanotube strands, then it becomes just the logistical problem (which is still stunningly difficult).

[GoSlash27]

1 hour ago, SomeGuy123 said:

6.  Even optimist economics of something like an elevator or laser launch are only cheap if there is large launch volume.  But space, as an economic endeavor, isn't profitable for large volumes.

Especially this part.

 A space elevator would never be able to haul enough payload in it's lifetime to recoup the initial investment.

Also, an addendum to #1:

 Should the cable break, it would cause an incredible amount of death and destruction for anyone and anything in it's path.

Best,
-Slashy

[sgt_flyer]

36 minutes ago, Vanamonde said:

Several of your objections assume that the structure would have a single spine of one sort of another. That is unlikely to be the case, for the reasons you cite. But the suspension bridges we're already been building for over a century weave many individual steel threads into massive cables, so that many individual elements could fail without the collapse of the entire structure. Some variation of this idea would probably be used on a space elevator. 

yup, those bridges basically use a tube with a lot of small cables inside it. (the cables bear the loads, not the tube) - and they can even go at an extremity of the tube, to replace the individual cables as needed. besides, those suspensions have good margins and are not meant to be used near their structural limits.

an important infrastructure like a space elevator would have even wider margins

Still, what would make me afraid of such a space elevator, is if the cable breaks near it's counterweight in space - imagine the tons and tons of cable that would fall across the earth (i doubt the cable would fall straight down - and with various orbital velocities... - basically anything around the equator would be at risk...

Edited February 6, 2016 by sgt_flyer

[cantab]

1) If the cable did break only the stretch below the break will fall, the stretch above will be retained. Also the likely design will be multiple cables with periodic cross-links, it will probably be flexible enough to take avoiding action with thrusters, and the lower reaches might be armoured. That said if the cable did break I can imagine it causing serious damage when it hits the ground.

2) The generally proposed construction method is to first build a "top station" in geostationary orbit, then extend cable down from there (and also up for a counterweight). It's right that once a working lightweight elevator is built it can be used to construct a heavier duty one.

3) Correct. Earth is annoyingly on the edge of a space elevator looking possible. Much larger or slower spinning and it would be clearly out of the question, much smaller and it would be simple.

4) What on Earth makes you think there wouldn't be a market for ultra-high-strength cable? And see the point about the cable being multi-stranded.

5a) Well rockets don't get much into orbit averaged out per day either. I don't think it will be that hard to work out cheaper than rockets, provided there's enough stuff to send up.

5b) Who says the cars don't maglev? OK, whatever they do there's going to be some wear, but I expect we'd seek to minimise it.

6) The economics may be an issue, yeah. It's plausible that a space elevator will only become useful once we have lunar and Martian colonies. (Extend the cable beyond GEO and you can fling payloads out on intercept trajectories or catch them on their return)

7) If I'm right about how it would respond to a break, then a low-altitude missile would only destroy a small part of the cable. A dangerous attack that would be costly and troublesome to repair from, sure, but not the end of the elevator. A high-altitude missile is basically an orbital launcher and easier to detect and intercept. In any case if a space elevator is so expensive, and becomes important enough to be economically viable, then chances are whoever owns it also has a strong military that can deter nation-state attacks.

As for terrorism, well air travel doesn't seem to have been hurt much by the increasingly onerous 'security'.

Don't get me wrong, the challenges of a space elevator are considerable, and it's probably the biggest and the most far-off of the launch megastructures. But I think that if humanity becomes an established spacefaring civilization then we will quite probably get to the task of building some. Likely the first will be on the Moon or Mars, and by the time one is built on Earth it's a case of scaling up the already-established engineering.

Of course, it's the "if humanity becomes an established spacefaring civilization" rider that's the big issue for me. That doesn't seem likely to happen in our lifetimes.

[Val]

Edit: @cantab ninjaed some of my points. I need to learn to write faster.

Quote

The elevator cable has to somehow be launched from a rocket while unspooling in flight, and it needs to mass thousands of tons in total.

That sounds a bit ludicrous.

I'm pretty sure most modern proposals suggest launching a factory and materials to GEO. The cable is then produced there and lowered towards the earth while a counterweight is raised above GEO, so the whole structure retains a CoM at GEO.

It'll eventually become a geo-satellite that touches the ground. Then the counterweight is pushed further out to pull the cable tight.

3 hours ago, SomeGuy123 said:

Yet since the cars can only crawl up over a period of days, it means you are not getting that much payload into orbit for your money per day.

Yes, if they ever build it, it must have at least 4 separate cables. 2 for up traffic and 2 for down, so there can be several climbers on each cable. Climbers are then unhooked at the ends and moved to a reverse direction cable. And to maintain at least half capacity if a climber breaks down midway.

3 hours ago, SomeGuy123 said:

it can't move or hide itself

No, it can't hide and probably not dodge a missile, but it can move little.

A structure that large can oscillate a little. Think Tacoma Narrows, except much much slower and controlled enough that it can be used to dodge out of the way of predictable dangers like known space debris on LEO. Well, that's the theory, anyway.

3 hours ago, SomeGuy123 said:

Once you have enough communication satellites to saturate all the available RF spectrum, and enough spy and weather monitoring satellites to meet everyone's need, there isn't actually much market for space travel.

Satellites don't last forever. They'll need replacing eventually. And probably sooner the cheaper it gets to launch them. Because there's really no reason to spend hundreds of millions on a satellite if it's cheap and fast to replace it. Of course that requires the launch prices to go down, which requires more launches, which requires cheaper satellites. Chicken and Egg problem.

Space Elevators won't happen unless someone sacrifices a lot of money, to make it happen.

But there are other type of proposed launch mechanisms with some similarities to Space Elevators that are not quite as preposterous or expensive to build. They are still a bit out there, though.

There a several types of Skyhooks and there's the Launch loop

More at Wikipedia

Edited February 7, 2016 by Val
Ninjaed

[vger]

Even if all of the other problems were solved, one probably always digs at me. What happens if there's a storm, or simply, the jet stream decides to center itself on top of the 'shaft?' That's potentially 300mph sustained winds. Which means your orbital platform would be like a lone firefighter trying to hang onto the end of a pressurized water hose.

 

As for whether or not there's any point: we're quickly approaching the commercial age of space. People want to go up. A space vator would make space accessible to a lot more people, not just those with optimal health. And corporations are now seriously looking into space mining. If we can make a space elevator work, it's by far the most cost-effective to ferry equipment and harvested resources between orbit and Earth.

Edited February 7, 2016 by vger

[Rakaydos]

14 minutes ago, vger said:

Even if all of the other problems were solved, one probably always digs at me. What happens if there's a storm, or simply, the jet stream decides to center itself on top of the 'shaft?' That's potentially 300mph sustained winds. Which means your orbital platform would be like a lone firefighter trying to hang onto the end of a pressurized water hose.

Just move the counterweight out a little furthur, and the tension will handle anything mere air can throw at it.

[Bill Phil]

16 minutes ago, vger said:

Even if all of the other problems were solved, one probably always digs at me. What happens if there's a storm, or simply, the jet stream decides to center itself on top of the 'shaft?' That's potentially 300mph sustained winds. Which means your orbital platform would be like a lone firefighter trying to hang onto the end of a pressurized water hose.

 

As for whether or not there's any point: we're quickly approaching the commercial age of space. People want to go up. A space vator would make space accessible to a lot more people, not just those with optimal health. And corporations are not seriously looking into space mining. If we can make a space elevator work, it's by far the most cost-effective to ferry equipment and harvested resources between orbit and Earth.

It's only cost effective after a long time. Decades to centuries. 

The gross world product has been increasing forever, and our total energy output has correlated with it. Eventually, when we get to the point where it's viable to build an elevator, we'll have pretty advanced tech and a lot of energy, so it won't be economical. It won't last economically and is not currently economical. Like many techs, actually. So I think it'd be wasted effort. We just need to wait until the relative cost space (money, energy) is low.

If global spending on space stays at about its current level, and the GWP continues to rise, then space will, slowly but surely, become a very common aspect of life.

[Nuke]

id rather the money go to reusable sstos or better reusable boosters.  you could develop skylon and build a fleet of them, on the space elevator r&d budget alone. both solve the problem of getting payload to orbit, but (assuming they are both viable) one is a few orders of magnitude more expensive. its sort of the same problem with fusion reserch, compare iter to polywell for example. why do things in hard mode?

[Camacha]

You people seem to forget everything seems impossibly hard and impractical before it is implemented on a reasonable scale. Tell people a 150 years ago that they need to move hundreds of thousands of people and equal amounts of goods each day by air. Impossible, they would tell you. Ships are simpler and do the trick. Yet it happens. Tell people 50 years ago any person needs to be able to share cat pictures with any other person in the street. They would not only tell you it is impossible and unnecessary, but that telegrams and mail work perfectly fine. Yet today we can, because we built a massive infrastructure. Before hand, it seems not practical, unreasonable even. Until we do it.

So, yes. A space elevator seems risky, expensive and unnecessary. Which, if history serves us, is exactly why we need to build one Every day we take technology for granted that not even a lifetime ago was a ridiculous fantasy. Me being able to tell you this proves it. Technology moves fast, we just need to apply ourselves to get it done.

Edited February 10, 2016 by Camacha

[Rdivine]

Is it possible to build an elevator at the poles? The elevator would be shaped more like a sharp pyramid for structural integrity.

[tater]

4 minutes ago, Rdivine said:

Is it possible to build an elevator at the poles? The elevator would be shaped more like a sharp pyramid for structural integrity.

The end point would not be in orbit.

[K^2]

Launch loop is way more practical than space elevator could ever be. There is zero reason for us to ever build space elevators.

[Camacha]

12 minutes ago, K^2 said:

There is zero reason for us to ever build space elevators.

Like mankind has ever needed reasons.

[PB666]

7 hours ago, SomeGuy123 said:

It's my fairly well informed opinion that Space Elevators are a horrible, no good, very bad idea.

Now, there are details I don't know.  But I feel that the facts I do know are so damning to outweigh any positive element that could be proposed.  Here's what I think I know :

1.  The elevator cable has to be at least 35,786 kilometers long.  This means if there is a break anywhere on this cable, the entire apparatus is destroyed.

2.  The elevator cable has to somehow be launched from a rocket while unspooling in flight, and it needs to mass thousands of tons in total.  This means if it's lost, it will not be cheap to replace.  (I understand that the first rocket launches a "leader" cable that is reasonable in amss and then you would have to add additional cables to the bundle by having climbers carry them)

3.  The cable is under so much structural stress that the only proposed material that is plausible are extremely long carbon nanotubes and extremely strong bonding between the separate molecules to prevent them from delaminating.   Oh, and it needs to be flexible so you can spool it as well...It can't just meet the strength requirements, it has to be flexible, resistant to external wear, manufacturable for a cost you can afford, and have enough longevity to last decades...  It's one thing to ask material scientists for unobtanium.  It's another to ask for 5 more desirable characteristics when the first one is already just a hair less than impossible.

4.  Due to 4, you need 35,786 continuous kilometers made to near nanoscale perfection.  Any flaw could potentially result in a catastrophic failure.  There won't really be any other commercial use for elevator length cables, so you're talking about creating an entire industry of R&D and engineering and factories just to manufacture these things.  A product that has to be perfect costs exponentially more than a product that has a moderate acceptable failure rate.  This is why Xboxes cost a tiny fraction of the cost of the same capacity computer in a missile.  (and actually no missile has nearly that much processing power or memory)

5.  Currently, the entire energy of orbit flight is supposed to be beamed to the elevator cable using lasers on the ground.  Solar cells can only be so light, so the transit car crawls it's way up.  This is horrible for 2 reasons

       a.  An elevator represents an immense capital asset, probably hundreds of billions of dollars.  Yet since the cars can only crawl up over a period of days, it means you are not getting that much payload into orbit for your money per day.  Like any asset, it depreciates and the elevator will need to be replaced, so for it to be worth it, it needs to deliver more payload than the same money could buy in mass produced conventional rockets.  

      b.  The climber cars put mechanical wear on the cable surface.

6.  Even optimist economics of something like an elevator or laser launch are only cheap if there is large launch volume.  But space, as an economic endeavor, isn't profitable for large volumes.  Once you have enough communication satellites to saturate all the available RF spectrum, and enough spy and weather monitoring satellites to meet everyone's need, there isn't actually much market for space travel.  There is no evidence that low gravity manufacturing will ever be better than machines on earth.  Raw materials are too expensive to recover - retrieving enough platinum to pay for an asteroid redirect mission would crash the market price for platinum....(note I do think it will eventually be worth it, but you need self replicating machines so that you only need to launch a factory massing a few thousand tons and it then copies itself with asteroid or lunar mined material thereafter.  That is radically advanced technology of the future.  And, if you had self replicating machines, you still might not build elevators.  You could instead build an array of thousands of automated factories making big dumb boosters in parallel...)

7.  A space elevator, a national asset worth hundreds of billions of dollars, needs a single purposeful break to fail.  A single missile, launched by a rival nation state or terrorists, need only break it at a single point to cause it to snap.  Probably the pieces wouldn't be dangerous to people on the ground, but it's essentially a financial asset that is indefensible (it can't move or hide itself, missiles can be stealthed with radar absorbing materials so you can't see them incoming) that is trivial to destroy.  (a 1-10 million missile knocks out hundreds of billions of elevator cable)

If a missile sounds too unlikely, keep in mind a simple shaped charge against the cable is enough.  That in turn means security and near strip searches of anyone permitted near the cable, which reduces the economic value of it because of all these costs and delays...

Anyways, TLDR, I don't see why anyone ever wasted any time on the space elevator as a concept.  It fails the most basic analysis of feasibility.  There are other ways to reach space, and some of those ways could be potentially made very cheap with advanced technology.

Also bad ideas,

1. picking up loose change on a busy freeway.

2. Pull on superman's cape.

3. Messing around with the ole long ranger.

4. And of course you don't wanna messa'round with Jim.

[fredinno]

10 hours ago, SomeGuy123 said:

Currently, the entire energy of orbit flight is supposed to be beamed to the elevator cable using lasers on the ground.  Solar cells can only be so light, so the transit car crawls it's way up.  This is horrible for 2 reasons

       a.  An elevator represents an immense capital asset, probably hundreds of billions of dollars.  Yet since the cars can only crawl up over a period of days, it means you are not getting that much payload into orbit for your money per day.  Like any asset, it depreciates and the elevator will need to be replaced, so for it to be worth it, it needs to deliver more payload than the same money could buy in mass produced conventional rockets.  

Or just use copper cables (which would not aid in supporting the structure) and Solar panels on the orbital end of the elevator.

10 hours ago, SomeGuy123 said:

There is no evidence that low gravity manufacturing will ever be better than machines on earth.

But you can make things like extra-high quality crystals not possible under 9.8m/s of gravity. Also, you forgot space tourism.

Edited February 7, 2016 by fredinno

[fredinno]

7 hours ago, Val said:

Satellites don't last forever. They'll need replacing eventually. And probably sooner the cheaper it gets to launch them. Because there's really no reason to spend hundreds of millions on a satellite if it's cheap and fast to replace it. Of course that requires the launch prices to go down, which requires more launches, which requires cheaper satellites. Chicken and Egg problem.

Or you know, just use a repairing station to do repairs.

9 hours ago, Rakaydos said:

Space Elevators on earth are impractically difficult, but the potential savings are ridiculus. We're talking THOUSANDfold price reduction to get to orbit, which keeps people chasing the white elephant.

Now, EML1 and EML2 elevators, and mars elevators, are both entirely reasonable propositions, even with existing tech. the problem is that you need something on the order of 200 tons of kevlar just for the "pilot line", which would necessitate either in-space production of cable, or a launcher of MCT scale.

 

 

6 hours ago, Bill Phil said:

It's only cost effective after a long time. Decades to centuries. 

The gross world product has been increasing forever, and our total energy output has correlated with it. Eventually, when we get to the point where it's viable to build an elevator, we'll have pretty advanced tech and a lot of energy, so it won't be economical. It won't last economically and is not currently economical. Like many techs, actually. So I think it'd be wasted effort. We just need to wait until the relative cost space (money, energy) is low.

If global spending on space stays at about its current level, and the GWP continues to rise, then space will, slowly but surely, become a very common aspect of life.

Still, we have consistently increased energy efficiency in all that time- elevators are more energy-efficient than rockets. Also, more efficiency actually increases energy use from greater use of the product in question.

2 hours ago, Camacha said:

Like mankind has ever needed reasons.

If we didn't, we would have a Mars base by now, BTW.

[Bill Phil]

27 minutes ago, fredinno said:

Or you know, just use a repairing station to do repairs.

 

 

Still, we have consistently increased energy efficiency in all that time- elevators are more energy-efficient than rockets. Also, more efficiency actually increases energy use from greater use of the product in question.

If we didn't, we would have a Mars base by now, BTW.

Actually, an elevator's energy goes from chemical to kinetic to electrical to kinetic. A rocket's only goes from chemical to kinetic, heat, and pressure, all at once. The heat and pressure end up pushing the rocket, and the kinetic keeps the pumps going. Rockets are very efficient. That's why they're expensive. Efficiency correlates with complexity. Usually, at least.

Even if an elevator was more efficient, it still needs to be built. And more energy needs to go into it, for each and every trip. GEO is a high energy orbit, and you need to spend that much energy to get there. You need to pay for all that energy. And you need to maintain it. And you need to build it...

[K^2]

2 hours ago, Camacha said:

Like mankind has ever needed reasons.

To build something that will take generations a colossal effort? There have always been a reason. Sometimes it's a stupid religious one, as is the case with pyramids, but unless you're proposing that we'll build space elevator because the church decides it's the thing to do, that sort of logic doesn't apply. And for pretty much everything else built on the same scale, nothing short of fear of extinction has ever been enough. As I've said above, launch loop is more feasible, and if we really get to the point where it's that or total annihilation, we'll build that. Space elevator will never be built. I'm pretty confident saying that. Not on Earth, at any rate.

[KerikBalm]

If it weren't for the moons of mars, it would be much more feasible on mars.

An orbital ring gets around many of the materials problems of a space elevator

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbital_ring

Basically, to get positive tension with a space elevator, you haave something above the altitude for geosynchronous orbit: The mass "wants" to move to a higher altitude because its velofity is too high.

Well, that requires a very very very long cable, which requires a very very very strong cable.

If you had something circling the earth at an altitude lower than geosynchronous orbit, you could put a cable on it and have it move faster than orbital velocity to get tension on the cable. The problem now is that the period at which it revolves around the earth needs to be much higher than the time for earth to rotate once. So you either need a track going around the equator on Earth, and the attachment point moves around the earth... not very convenient for loading stuff, but I suppose you could have a parallel track where you load a high speed maglev freight train, and mathc speeds and rendevous with the attachment point...

Or you have the rotating track in space... an orbital ring, and then you anchor it with "mini space elevators" that are essentially cables to maglev trains that run on the orbital ring.

The requires multiple much much much shorter space elevators, and a constant power supply to keep the maglev system running and the orbital ring spun up. But now you've got elevators space evenly around the world for loading cargo, and you've only got a journey of a few hundred KM to space... not a ridiculously long travel to geostationary orbit.

Once you get to the top though... the station is not in orbit... its sitting on top of something that is moving about orbital velocity though.

You would need a second maglev train system on the track (no cable attached) that will then accelerate the payload along the ring to orbital levoity, release the payload, then travel "anti spin" along to ring back to the cable anchored station.

It sounds more complicated, but the required material properties are much lower, steel cable would be sufficient. As with many concepts... the engineering challenge to get something like this started (even if its fairly straightforward once its built) is staggering.

Getting even a small starter ring (basically just a circular cable) to orbit, and spinning it up without being anchored would be very difficult. Such a ring would be unstable, and would need to be anchored very quickly to stabilize it ... I suppose you could have active stabilization using rocket propellant... but that would run out pretty fast. Using beamed power to get higher Isps could buy you some more time to get the other things attached...

And you'd need a stable worldwide peace to build and operate something like this.... and strong terrorism defenses...