Electromagnetic vehicles, such as the one with the American flag on it, would travel between Earth and space delivering passengers and cargo. An airliner lands on a large platform in the Indian Ocean.
Passengers scramble off the plane.
From the station, passengers catch a space plane to the moon, or perhaps to Mars. A few go on to mining jobs on an asteroid lassoed to the elevator cable to serve as sort of a space-based anchor for the system. Though it sounds like science fiction, the space elevator is the subject of a serious report published by NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center. Technology could be far enough along in the next 50 years for construction to begin in the latter half of the 21st century, Smitherman said. Several ideas about how a space elevator would be built are floating around, Smitherman said.