space elevators

So how much is the cost to lift power satellite parts to GEO?

This breaks down into running cost, which should mostly be energy and capital costs. Labor should be a relatively small part of a mature freight operation.

Last year I calculated the absolute minimum energy for a space elevator carrying up 2000 tonnes per day. http://eugen.leitl.org/A-2000-tonne-per-day-Space-Elevator1.ppt It takes about a GW to lift about 2400 tonnes per day or 24 million kWh to lift 2.4 million kg. I.e., about 10 kWh lifts a kg to GEO. At our target price, that 10 cents. It's only a dollar at current consumer prices for electricity.

The price to put up a space elevator can be estimated. If nanotube cable of adequate strength can be made at all, it will take about 100,000 tonnes of it, assuming the cable weighs 50 times the daily payload. I think we can safely assume that anything produced in that quantity will not cost more than a few dollars a kg. 100 million kg at even $10 a kg is only a billion dollars. It will probably take a number of times that figure to clean up the flying space junk and place the seed cable.

Even if the cleanup and space elevator cost $100 billion, and was depreciated at 10% per year, that's a transport capital cost of only $10 billion a year. Taking the elevator's capacity at only half a million tonnes per yer, the capital cost would be $20,000 per tonne or $20 per kg.

That's less than 10% of what we can pay for power sat parts delivered to GEO and still charge under a penny a kWh for electric power.

The problem is we don't have strong enough nanotube cable and might never get it.