Over at The New Scientist. And contrary to commenters who think that few indulge in it, the current top posting repeats the fallacy of high launch costs.

hmm, that's funny. I read the whole page, I didn't see any words about launch costs. The topmost post was about the difficulty of attaining orbital spaceflight, and mentioned that chemical rockets are inefficient in the sense of low payload fraction. surely you're not arguing that?

I disagree that a) "inefficiency" defined in such a way is a problem and b) that the solution to that non-problem is a space elevator. The implication is clearly about launch costs, even if the phrase isn't used.

Mass fraction doesn't matter. $/kg is what matters. Spending billions to reduce the mass fraction just increases the capitalized cost if the flight rate stays low.

A simple formual for lowering launch costs:

TotalLaunchCost=InitialInvestment*10%/FlightsPerYear+IncrementalLaunchCosts

That initial investment is the one everyone forgets! If you are a private company, you must pay either interest on a loan or return on investment to investors (or your won't get investors!). If you are public (NASA), it is less obvious but since you are spending Joe publics money, and Joe public's money has a time value of about 10% (just ask Joe public if he'd rather have $100 today or $110 a year from now - it is about a wash at that point), you still need to apply propper discount rates - as in, Joe public (your boss) would prefer to spend less on infrastructure up front and more on per flight costs.

When you examine space elevators using this formula, they are less appealing - though perhaps still doable. (Space elevators appear to have a rather low maximum flight rate - if it takes a week to get there, your maximum flight rate is 54 per year...)