It is not the fault of the students who wrote the paper, but this is an exceptionally good example of terrible science reporting in popular media. Practically every sentence of the article is wrong including multiple errors in the title.
> Feasible & Inexpensive
The paper says "Building a spaceline
would be a huge engineering challenge, stretching the
limits of current human capacity - but not exceeding
them" which is a far stretch from "feasible and inexpensive"
> Scientists Find
Second year graduate students
> In a paper published on the online research archive arXiv
An as yet un-peer-reviewed pre-publication draft that is being prepared for submisson --- it says that right on top of the first page.
> After doing the math, the researchers estimated that the simplest version of the lunar elevator would be a cable thinner than a pencil and weigh about 88,000 pounds
They they actually said: "Let’s say such a line was made of a cable with a0 =10−7m2: its total mass would then be around 40,000 kg.". So yes, they're right that it would be "thinner than a pencil". A cable with diameter section of 0.36mm is definitely "thinner than a pencil". (They are misquoting them saying thinner than a pencil lead... presumably referencing the lead in a 0.5mm mechanical pencil, not the lead in the regular pencil).
So yes, you could spend billions of dollars to build an elevator that could lift ~100kg off the surface of the moon to GEO, and take months to years to do it any any speed you're likely to achieve with a solar powered elevator tethered by a 0.36mm thick line.
> Feasible & Inexpensive
The paper says "Building a spaceline would be a huge engineering challenge, stretching the limits of current human capacity - but not exceeding them" which is a far stretch from "feasible and inexpensive"
> Scientists Find
Second year graduate students
> In a paper published on the online research archive arXiv
An as yet un-peer-reviewed pre-publication draft that is being prepared for submisson --- it says that right on top of the first page.
> After doing the math, the researchers estimated that the simplest version of the lunar elevator would be a cable thinner than a pencil and weigh about 88,000 pounds
They they actually said: "Let’s say such a line was made of a cable with a0 =10−7m2: its total mass would then be around 40,000 kg.". So yes, they're right that it would be "thinner than a pencil". A cable with diameter section of 0.36mm is definitely "thinner than a pencil". (They are misquoting them saying thinner than a pencil lead... presumably referencing the lead in a 0.5mm mechanical pencil, not the lead in the regular pencil).
So yes, you could spend billions of dollars to build an elevator that could lift ~100kg off the surface of the moon to GEO, and take months to years to do it any any speed you're likely to achieve with a solar powered elevator tethered by a 0.36mm thick line.