Space Elevator

Built around thick cables of carbon nanotube, space elevators are the primary way humans get goods and people up and down the gravity well of a planet or major moon. The first order of business for any new colony is to construct one, as it slashes the costs of bringing in resources from off-planet to a fraction of what it would cost to transport them by shuttle. Nevertheless, space elevators are extremely complicated and expensive engineering projects. Generally built on the equator of a rotating celestial body, the cables must be capable of withstanding incredible forces as gravity and the centripetal force from the rotation of the planet threaten to snap the cable. The cable itself must also be protected from space debris, as a collision at an inopportune time could cause a failure of the cable.

All inhabited human planets have a space elevator, in most cases connected directly to All-Crossing. This allows people to easily travel between the inhabited worlds of Human Space, though communications must take place using signal nodes at the mercy of the Tein Gate schedules (as repeaters are passed back and forth through the gate), or by courier for sensitive matters.

Discovery

Space elevators had been theorized for over a hundred years before one was built, and abortive attempts to build one were made twice on Earth's equator before the successful construction of a space elevator on Borneo. The key advance leading to the construction of the space elevator was the ability to produce long carbon nanotube fibers at scale, giving humanity a material to use as the core of the elevator that could withstand the immense pressures of being stretched all the way to orbit.