Focus Fusion Society 
“Orbital Railroads: Beanstalks and Space Fountains” By Paul Lucas
http://www.strangehorizons.com/2003/20030714/orbital_railroads.shtml
Note: The quote below was edited extensively to fit in this post (and to stress the Space Fountain). Click the above link to read the entire article.
“The space elevator will be built about 50 years after everyone stops laughing.”—Arthur C. Clarke
The main obstacle keeping the human race from colonizing the solar system is the first 160 kilometers. Climbing out of Earth’s gravity well is difficult, dangerous, and extremely expensive. Today, it costs over $10,000 to put just a single pound of payload into orbit, and a single flight of the Space Shuttle costs over a half billion dollars.
Yet this is not a situation unique in the history of exploration. In the early 1800s, overland travel across the American Frontier was equally arduous and wallet-heavy. ... Some ... thought it might take over 800 years to colonize the American West.
Yet by the end of that century a new technology—the railroad—had accomplished the task in only a few short decades. Our difficulties in achieving orbit might be solved by a similar method—by building a railroad track straight into space.
Originally proposed ... in 1960, the concept of Space Elevators [sometimes nicknamed “Beanstalks”] has been taken up by many science fiction writers over the years, ... and countless science article speculations. It is currently under serious preliminary study at NASA…
The basic principle of a Space Elevator is fairly simple ... If you anchored an incredibly strong wire to Earth’s surface at the equator ... you would end up with a perfectly-straight railroad track right into space….
Once the cable is set up, elevators can ride up and down it via electromagnetic rails, delivering cargo straight into orbit…
The Space Elevator is a simple, straightforward idea with one very serious complication: the structural stresses put on the elevator cable would be truly enormous… one material meeting these requirements has recently been synthesized, albeit only in microscopic quantities…
Once the technology matures, orbital interface travel from surface to space is estimated to be reduced to less than a thousand dollars a ton for cargo, or a rate equivalent to a passenger train for human riders.
Today it costs about $22,000 per kilogram [$10,000 per pound] to put cargo into Low Earth Orbit because of the enormous energies standard rockets must generate in order to reach orbital velocity. Using today’s energy costs, it would take about 75 cents per kilogram [~34 cents per pound, or ~$700 per ton] for a Space Elevator to do the same thing.
A Space Elevator would pay for its initial set-up costs in a few decades. The builders could even make money by selling the delta-V of the Space Elevator to outbound ships, flinging them into space from the far end of the cable…
.... a ... Space Elevator could ... cost ... $10 billion dollars for initial set-up costs.
.... Today, carbon nanotubes cost about $500 per gram of mass, or roughly $500 million dollars per ton. A Space Elevator cable will, of course, weigh many thousands of tons…
[AN ALTERNATIVE]An alternative method to the Space Elevator for building a railroad into space is the Space Fountain...
A Space Fountain uses a continuous stream of electromagnetically accelerated metal pellets to hold things up at extreme altitudes…
Small metallic pellets by the millions would be shot up to a “deflector” station far overhead, which would use magnetic field scoops to catch the pellets, curve them back down with an electromagnetic accelerator, then shoot them back down to the ground… The pressure exerted on the magnetic fields of the scoop and curved EM accelerator by the continuous stream of pellets would keep the station aloft.
The ... Space Fountain ... uses a continuous ... stream of pellets to constantly exert pressure on the station it is holding up…
.... the pellets and the suspended station never actually make physical contact; the magnetic fields of the scoop and curved accelerator act as a kind of buffer, preventing any physical damage from the pellets screaming at the station at over 4 km/second. Yet the pellets exert pressure on the magnetic fields as they pass through them, and this force is in turn passed on to the physical structure of the station, holding it aloft.
Using this technique, it is thought the fountain could hold up a full-sized, fully-equipped space station ... at ... heights of 40,000 kilometers plus. However, the higher the station, the higher the required start-up and maintenance energy… For the purposes of building a tower capable of launching vehicles into orbit, 40 to 200 kilometers ... may be more than sufficient…
.... once the system is set up, the energy needed to maintain it would be much less than its start-up energy… some energy will eventually be lost over time, but this can easily be continually compensated for ... at a small fraction of the energy needed for the system’s initial set-up… even if all power were cut to the pellet stream, it would still function normally for a while, and it might take up to several hours for the suspended station ... to feel even a wobble.
Space Fountain structures ... will ... be built with multiply-redundant support streams ... with up to ... eight per individual structure, each with its own independent power supply…
To be continued…
], Oklahoma. It is located central to the contiguous United States and North America, and has much of the infrastructure needed for a space facility. 
