Even as the price of space flight came down dramatically in the 2030s, the environmental and financial cost of using chemical rockets to escape Earth’s gravity held back human expansion to the moon and beyond. There was also widespread anger that space exploration was becoming a preserve of the ultra-rich, leading to a desire for access to space to be democratised.

A dream, for centuries, had been to build a space elevator to take us from Earth into space without using rockets. But how…