What's more, you could still have sort of a 'semi-star.' An object massive enough, with core temperatures and pressures great enough to fuse deuterium, the heavy isotope of hydrogen....but they soon consume that, and stop, because they can't burn the more common, harder to fuse, 'light' hydrogen....

I dunno, she looks pretty hot to me...

You mean birds don't sprout from birdseed, either...?

So, does Nichelle Nichols own all rights to Bluetooth headsets...?

Still more on this and other Russian huma commercial space ventures:

Some of the crazy videos one can find on YouTube and elsewhere, suggests otherwise...

"Sometimes when I read these kinds of reports, I get a little bit dumbfounded that "First Contact" for us is also assumed to be first contact for whoever we're contacting."

"(as a water toilet would be pretty nasty in space)"

No stepping outside for a smoke, either...

+1!

Just being in international airspace/waters/whatever, doesn't put you out of anyone's jurisdiction. It'll still be subject to the laws of the country of the company that owns it, like a ship. (though there could be the equivalent of 'flags of convenience.')

"I predict that eventually, everything will go to GEO. "

The ascending car would be a very cooperative, easy to track target (unlike, say, an incoming warhead), with guide lights and the like (possibly low power lasers themselves pointing down) to insure accurate tracking. You lose lock, ground laser shuts down. Not that hard.

The number of stages has little relationship to the accelerations you impose. It's true that G's increase at the same thrust as the ship burns fuel and gets lighter...that' what throttling or shutting some engines down is for.

"A space elevator under the control of the UN? Oh, Lord. Let's hope not."

A space elevator's center of mass (like a see saw) must be in geostationary orbit. If it's the same material going down 22,000 miles, it would have to extend out from GEO the same distance, for a total length of 44,000 miles.

"You can depart the elevator at other points along its length by using rockets. This is obvious, right?"

A de-orbit burn from geostationary, back down to LEO (and through the VanAllen belts again, though rather faster than on the way up, doesn't come for free.

Unless it's superconductive, you'll lose far too much poser over thousands of miles from electrical resistance.

Ground acceleration of any kind has its advantages (though you can only launch in the azimuth of the system itself), but fuel itself is not an issue. Rocket propellant is cheap, and not the reason space launch costs are so high.