Chronos:
There sort of are other options. You don’t start with a full-scale elevator cable that can handle hundred-ton cars. You start with a tiny, tiny cable, that can only support an extremely small car, and then you send up that extremely small car carrying a spool of more cable material as payload, which it grafts onto the existing cable as it climbs, to increase the cross-section size and hence strength of the cable by, say, 5%. And then repeat with another small car, 5% larger, and repeat. So by the time that you get to the first full-sized cable, most of the mass of the cable has been lifted by space elevator, not by rocket.
That said, even that tiny “starter cable” is still one hell of a big rocket launch.
This is more or less how they spin suspension-bridge cables… but even the tiny starter cable needs the bridge towers and anchors in place to attach to.
A suspension bridge is a type of bridge in which the deck is hung below suspension cables on vertical suspenders. The first modern examples of this type of bridge were built in the early 1800s. Simple suspension bridges, which lack vertical suspenders, have a long history in many mountainous parts of the world.
Besides the bridge type most commonly called suspension bridges, covered in this article, there are other types of suspension bridges. The type covered here has cables suspended betwee...