International Space Elevator - Earth Equator

Music for the description: Living in Space - Torus Redux - YouTube

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True to their word, USAN and ISEC (the International Space Elevator Consortium) managed to bring NATO and EATA to the negotiation table after years of non-negotiable war and, with their help, built a space elevator in Brazil in 2052 CE. This was only possible thanks to the industrialization of the supermaterial graphene. By 2020 CE, graphene sheets could be produced at 2 meters a minute. By 2050 CE, graphene was now available in virtually every aspect of civilization from batteries to smart devices and cars. Thanks to graphene, smart phones are almost replaced by augmented reality smart contact lenses. Originally, carbon nanotubes were the main candidate for a space elevator tether. But the problem was that they could only be produced in the millimeters range at best. Graphene, however, could be 3D printed in long tether belts which could be rolled up and lowered from geosynchronous orbit to the ground. This new space elevator was called the International Space Elevator as any alliance or country was allowed to use it as long as their payloads were not intended for covert purposes or black operations. 

Building the ISE proved to be extremely difficult. Building the rotating space station (ISE Orbital) was the easy part. The hard part was manufacturing, rolling up, and lowering down the 35,786-kilometer-long graphene belt from geosynchronous orbit to a platform at the new portion of the Brazilian space agency. In science fiction, it was commonly depicted a space elevator would be a structure built from the ground up. However, the reality was simpler: send a space station to geosynchronous orbit and lower a tether to the Earth and attach it to the ground. When the ISE belt was lowered to the ground, aircraft had to catch it with a hook and guide it down to keep it from swaying in the high-altitude wind. When attached to the ground, the massive counterweight, a small asteroid brought in by the asteroid mining company AstroForge, was attached to the top to counterbalance the faster orbiting speeds of the lower portions of the graphene tether and make the elevator tether even like a suspension bridge. 

Upon completion, NATO and EATA were excited as this space elevator reduced the cost of space travel from less than a hundred per kilogram to virtually nothing since there was no fuel being used. Due to the elevator's benefits for both sides, the ISE was declared a neutral zone by the United Nations of Earth and Luna. SpinLaunch offered a similar price reduction, but their payloads had to be small and aerodynamic. This space elevator's climber could send 4 24 kT payloads and 640 passengers to orbit in one lift at no fuel cost. Even though Olympus Orbital was Earth's main space station, the ISE soon replaced that status and Brazil became flooded with space tourism, space contracts, and space investment. Space exploration was about to take on a whole new frontier with the ISE. Millionaires, billionaires, and travel ticket winners were now not the only people who could visit space. SpaceX has plans to use the ISE to finish the construction of their long delayed sublight interstellar ark that would use Mark 3 Reed Drives to reach Proxima Centauri by 2073 CE: the Mayflower, after sublight nano-probes from the Breakthrough Starshot project revealed that Proxima b was a promising exoplanet.

After the success of the ISE, the USAN has new plans to place another space elevator on Luna. Since Luna had weaker gravity, a Kevlar tether belt was sufficient to lift payloads to Lunar orbit.

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International Space Elevator Specifications:

Cost:

- $18,000,000,000 USD

ISE Orbital:

- Habitat: 4 Modular Habitat Units and 4 Large Wheel Habitats.
- Artificial Gravity: 1g (3 RPM).
- Diameter: 200 m.
- Power: 9 Solar Arrays. 
- Thermal Control: 12 Silicon Carbide Radiators.

Climber:

- Cargo: 4 24 1 kT cargo racks.
- Passengers: 8 80 passenger modules.
- Climbing Gear: 16 climber wheels (powered by the electrically charged graphene tether, like a bumper car).

Tether:

- Material: graphene composite belt.
    - Tensile Strength: 900 GPa.

Counterweight: 

- A small asteroid brought in by AstroForge. 

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A good video on building a space elevator:

Exciting New Updates About Space Elevator Technology...Possible After All? - YouTube