Inflatable Space Elevator Patented

[PortalHunter]

1) It's an incredibly irritating example of how news media works. I must have seen five or six different articles people were sharing all over facebook with titles like "company to build tower 25x taller than worlds tallest building!" No they've come up with a concept design. They've not got any plan to build it.

You guys remember that thread about star birth rates decreasing? Facebook mangled it. This is the kind of stuff that makes people believe gravity fails during planetary alignments.

2) With things like this the failure modes are always what I think of. There will always be accidents, what will happen to this structure if one of the returning planes lands poorly and crashes into the runway instead? What happens if it hits the tower? What happens if someone deliberately flies into the tower? If it's built in the middle of nowhere then it the human cost might be slim but the economic cost could be ruinous.

https://xkcd.com/697/