Making better rope. Seriously. The Space Elevator guys are working with micro-fibers to come up with some kind of rope/scaffording that would support its own w

Making better rope. Seriously. The Space Elevator guys are working with micro-fibers to come up with some kind of rope/scaffording that would support its own weight and that of an elevator all the way out to GSO, but it sounds like there ought to be some early victories where you could take microfibers and create super-light rope and cabling. I have no idea what the impact would be but it sounds like something very interesting and somewhat useful that the commercial sector wouldn't develop on its own. It could also lead to a bunch of other stuff that'd be neat, like new textiles. If nothing else, we'd learn stuff about what was feasible and what wasn't.