Quote:
Originally Posted by Hemi-Cuda
with a large enough counterweight, couldn't you place the station a lot closer to the Earth?
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I suppose you could.
The counterweight acts to add tension to the rope, and has to counteract the mass of the rope itself and the mass of anything attached to the rope (the elevator, or non-moving station attached to the rope).
The tension would probably have to be insane though for a station with any size, the nice thing about a space elevator is that the station's mass can be ignored at geosynchronous orbit; gravity and centrifugal force cancel. It's basically weightless with respect to the cable system. You can build it as big as you want.
A bunch of math that's too late to try and grok here:
http://www.zadar.net/space-elevator/