this post was submitted on 23 Sep 2024
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IF fully reusable spacecraft ever becomes reality, then a space elevator ON EARTH would probably never be needed.
On the moon, probably. On Mars, maybe. But Earth, a fully reusable rocket, combined with in space assembly just makes a lot more sense.
Especially long term when we actually start gathering raw materials in space. We'll eventually only need to send people , and complex things like microprocessors into space, and the rest can just be made up there.
Even reusable rockets use a tremendous amount of fuel. Falcon 9 burns 700,000 gallons per second.
Untrue, that's many times over the 25,000 gallons of kerosene they keep on board. That's still a lot of gas, but not 700,000 gallons, not by a long shot. If it burned that much per second it wouldn't even produce enough thrust to carry its own fuel payload
My bad for trusting Google top result.
395,700 kg fuel first stage. Burn time 162 seconds.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_9#:~:text=The%20rocket%20has%20two%20stages,rocket%2C%20carrying%20143%20into%20orbit.
The 39,000 gallons of LOX in the Falcon 9 doesn't make itself.
To inject a source, there's 395,700 kg total propellant on the first stage, and a burn time of 162 seconds. That gives about 2,442.6 kg/second, and assuming it's fuel balanced it comes out to something like 700 liters of RP-1 per second. Could OP have been using thousands of gallons instead, by accident?
It's still a lot, though, while a space elevator is just a really tall elevator, or alternatively an EV that goes up and down.