That's so cool. I'm going to wait to buy a house there until it drops below $10 million. lol

Can anyone even afford to have a serious mission to the Moon at the moment?

Given the horrible spending practices of the US, we could.

The real key to colonization is to reduce the costs of launching payload to orbit. Currently, it costs the US between $5,000-$10,000 per KG of material launched into orbit. However, if we built a space elevator (Cost

I agree that the elevator needs to be built but I have to be honest in saying I'm skeptical that it would come in anywhere near budget.  The engineering challenges are pretty immense and the scale of the project is really on a whole new level beyond anything humanity has done before.  None of that is a reason not to try, but they are damn good reasons to be very sure we can commit to the project (both politically and financially) before we start.

To me a space elevator would be the first truly space-age structure built by humanity.  What I mean by this is sort of tiered building capacity for a society...it starts at building fires working its way up to make-shift tents, adobe houses, large public structures of increasing craftmanship, and then a big leap to skyscrapers.  From skyscrapers we move to monolith structures like man-made islands (which we've already done), and now we are looking at building the first structure (term used loosely) that would simultaneously be...and not be... on the earth. 

It really is a whole new step akin to the leap to skyscrapers some 125 years ago.  Granted I don't think we will be seeing a space elevator in every medium sized city in the next 125 years.....but the potential impact to the human race could go far beyond that of skyscrapers.

I did some reading on the elevator:

The current cost to build an elevator using current materials is $6.2 billion USD. I hate to say it, but for the potential it brings, that's absolutely peanuts. The engineering challenges are large, but the fact is that we have the technology to do it.

I don't think you'd need a space elevator in every medium sized city to be useful - just in the same way you don't need a big airport in every medium sized city.

The advantages of an elevator, and the impact it'd have on humanity would be every bit as large as the skyscraper has been for expanding the commercial abilities of cities. With payload pricing dropping by 90-95%, we would find space travel, and utilization of space-based resources to become commonplace.

I really think that, out of any possible project America could embark on in the next 50 years, this one is the most critical to our survival as a superpower. Having the ability to reach out and explore the moon, and space at cheap fares would bolster our economy, create millions of new jobs, and usher in the next real phase of space travel. The biggest problem has never been going places, but overcoming our own gravity. Once that's done, we'll find so many reasons to go to space, we won't want to return to earth :-p

Wow, that is amazing.  Thats not much more than the Large Hadron Collider.

Though to be honest I would put the figure a lot higher than that, I'd multiply it by two because it seems American made projects end up costing twice as much as proposed and multiply it by two again because we've never built anything like it.  But still, at that low cost there is a possibility I can see it done in my lifetime.

NASA says they're already dangerously underfunded.

How are they going to afford this?

It would be very strategically useful though.

By my understanding, it's believed it'll be about 20 years before they have the technology to build a space elevator. They need to perfect the nanocarbon tubing technology to build a structure with the tinsillary strength not to tear itself apart first. And I believe that at the moment the longest we can make carbon nanotubes is a few inches.

So it really will be a few more decades before we figure out the actual feisability of such an endeavour. Would be damn cool though.

As far as I know they need to increase the tensile strength of carbon nano tubes by 5 times before they even consider drawing up plans for building a space elevator.

A space elevator would be amazing and our current technology out of reach, but I thought a space elevator was any tower that shot things into space (am I wrong?) For isntance, a large runway to build up speed before it hits a large tower that puts it in orbit.

Maybe thats a space cannon.