If the clips grip with enough friction to break the thread.
If you can get a CNT thread long enough to provide gripping surface.

I thought about this for a bit.  I guess the reason is, is that scientific experiments like this take time and funding to perform.  There already are tensile strength experiments for smaller lengths.  The other explanation is that the macrolength CNT producer doesn't want to give up the CNT.

Where does this 2 ton limit come from? Wasn't the idea to have climbers use the first ribbon to carry up the second, and those two a third etc.?

{snip}

For the proposed 90 tonne (90,000kg) vehicle the figures are just as tough as the total energy requres IS directly proportional to the MASS of the vehicle so I'll just scale my previous result by the proportional mass increase of 90,000 / 7,000 (or about 12.857), giving the required engine power of 1,215kW (or 1.215MW!) to achieve the proposed average 0.1G acceleration for 27 seconds.  Remember these final engine powers are net average power over the entire acceleration time, so you would need (much) less power for the first few m/s and MUCH MORE power for the final couple of seconds IF you wanted to keep the acceleration at a constant 0.1G.

eg., To go from 26 to 27 m/s in 1 second (the final second of acceleration) for the 7,000kg vehicle this would be as follows:
E = 0.5 * 7,000 * ((27 * 27) - (26 * 26))
E = 0.5 * 7,000 * (729 - 676)
E = 185,500 J in 1 second, or 185.5kW
For the 90 tonne vehicle this would be 2,385kW!

If you want a low power engine, you must accept the acceleration will slow down the faster you go.{snip}

On the notion of active satellites, the national security considerations alone might require some work on the part of anyone running the SE.  Here I'm thinking of the various spy satellites employed by both the US and other governments.  If they need to be in a certain orbit, and that orbit intersects the operational path of the SE, I wouldn't be surprised if a few sudden steering movements were required after a late-night call from the Pentagon.    Of course, they hate to advertise the orbits of their birds, and I think having to notify a company to move their space elevator would count as a pretty big advertisement to their thinking...

Might it be possible to pipe it there and have constant streams of it here and there, to provide lift and create a bit of wind to defect the smallest objects?

If we can make a tapered string 35,578km long (and a tapered tower 200km high), maybe we can make a tapered pipe 35,578km long?

Wouldn't it be easier to deflect the objects with blasts of air?