space elevators damnit

Surely the best way to bring the goods back down to ground level is for these guys to finally get around to working out how to build a space elevator. It's the gift that keeps on giving. Cheap and easy way to move items out of the Earth's atmosphere and into orbit (space craft for mining or exploration or colonisation, huge sacks of garbage for shooting into the sun for disposal so we no longer need landfill sites) and at that same time, equally cheap and safe means of bringing in bits of asteroids in a controlled way that isn't going to create tidal waves or huge holes in the ground, or scary atmospheric effects like in ID4.

In fact, you build two together, surely, so the one bringing asteroids down to earth is pulled by gravity, and in turn provides power to the other one to lift items up into orbit.