Part One: A technologically Possible Aeronautical Version.
There was actually a somewhat similar, though of course almost infinitely smaller, device.
The spy gondola, spy basket, observation car or sub-cloud car (German: Spähgondel or Spähkorb) is a crewed vessel that an airship hiding in cloud cover could lower several hundred metres1 to a point below the clouds in order to inconspicuously observe the ground and help navigate the airship. It was a byproduct of Peilgondel development (a gondola to weight an airship's radio-locating antenna). They were used almost exclusively by the Germans in the First World War on their military airships.
LZ26's basket was lowered from the airship on a specially constructed tether 1,000 metres (3,300 ft) long;[4] other airships may have used one approximately 750 metres (2,460 ft) long.[5] The tether was high grade steel with a brass core insulated with rubber to act as the telephone cable.[4]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spy_basket
Obviously a low flying Zeppelin hovering over one spot could theoretically have lowered its spy basket to the ground and used it as an elevator for people or objects.
And possibly some science fiction stories featuring large aircraft capable of hovering could have the aircraft dropping an "elevator" to the ground to transfer people and goods. Such stories should have a reason why the entire aircraft doesn't land, but instead uses a much smaller device as an "elevator".
A Large enough aircraft could have several kilometers or miles of cable to lower the smaller craft with. Experts in material strength should be able to say how long a cable could get to hold a vehicle of a specific weight under a specific surface gravity without breaking.
Part two: Use in Astronautics.
And I have thought of a possible use in astronautics.
A large spaceship visit a moon or asteroid that is large enough to be gravitationally rounded and thus appear spherical when seen from space and have proportionally low relief. Several spacecraft land on the surface and are used as a ready made base for some scientific, industrial, mining, military, or purposes. The large spacecraft stays in orbit around the world, to avoid using up too much delta v and not having enough for the trip back home.
The large orbiting spaceship has an eccentric orbit allowing it to get rather low over the surface of the world - the precise lower limit may depend on the altitude at which the extremely thin atmosphere of the world be dense enough to have significant drag on the spaceship.
When someone (or some objects) from the orbiting spaceship is sent down to the planet the orbiting spaceship lowers a much smaller spacecraft down the cable to full length as it approaches the lowest point in its orbit, which is always close to the location of the base. At the lowest point the smaller spacecraft detached from the capable and uses its rockets to match speed with the rotation of the world and then travels to the base location and land.
When someone or something has to be sent to the orbiting spaceship one of the small spacecraft is launched on a suborbital trajectory which will take it to the region where the end of the cable will be approaching. So the spacecraft will rendezvous and attach to the end of the cable at the lowest point in the orbiting spaceship's orbit. Then the orbiting spaceship will winch up the cable to draw the small spacecraft to it.
And I guess that such a procedure would take less fuel than sending the small spacecraft between the surface and the orbiting spaceship using their rockets all the way. And quite possibly all the fuel for the small spacecraft will have to be brought at great expense all the way from Earth, so saving fuel may be a big deal.
Thus I have managed to think of an astronautical use for a cable of technologically plausible length.
Part Three: Future Technology Might Seem Like Magic to US.
You might want to look at the Sliding Scale of Science Fiction Hardness.
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/SlidingScale/MohsScaleOfScienceFictionHardness
The lower the hardness score you desire for your story, the less you need to justify to your readers the technological marvels in your story. You just assume that over centuries or millennia of scientific and technological evolution and revolution, technology has been developed which seems like magic to people in the early 21st centuries.
The higher the hardness score you desire for your story, the more you need to justify to your readers the technological marvels in your story. You need to decide how plausible various futuristic marvels seem to your or to scientists, and limit your use to the ones most plausible.
So if you decide that a low score is good enough for your story, you can use all the scientific and technological wonders you want to, such as orbit to ground cables. But you need to be careful to make their use logical and consistent. So if a particular technological marvel would solve all your protagonist's problems too easily, it can't exist in your setting, or maybe be too expensive or otherwise unavailable to them.
Heroes ignoring an available tool which would solve their problems with ease will annoy some readers.