Reply To: network security

[belbear]

Aeronaut wrote:
Yepper. That’s why so many of us are looking forward to a Space Elevator. For some missions, the SE could eliminate or greatly minimize the amount of thrust required by ‘launching’ from near the tether’s end.

Just a matter of finding out how to build 40000 klicks of carbon nanotube cable that weighs less than a conventional rocket can carry and you’re halfway there. Unfortunately the unique in-orbit assembly capabilities of the Space Shuttle won’t be available anymore to assemble the first geostationary satellite.
After all, now Constellation is cancelled, nobody knows when an post-Shuttle American manned spacecraft will ever fly again and how it will look like.