I have absorbed several accounts of the viability of the “space elevator” from Scientific American and various programs on the Discovery Channel, but I have remained as skeptical as I am eager for this advance. I decided to run the numbers myself, completely unassisted, to see how viable it seems to me. After about 20 minutes of “math fun”, I came across the Wikipedia article which basically had it all solved out for me. Check it out: Space Elevator. I highly recommend reading it, and definitely not reading the bullshit I was going to write before I found it =)