Future of Our Space Program

[Experiment Garden]

It seems to me to be ironic that the US is getting rid of its space program even as crazy people like these are planning a space program:

galactic suite

The site shows their interesting take on a shuttle launch. (In the image gallery) Rather than using a booster rocket it looks like they are going to use a maglev track ramp to propel the rocket to escape velocity.

Personally I don't think these guys will ever be able to pull this project off. But who knows?

[CraigD]

Originally Posted by Experiment Garden

Rather than using a booster rocket it looks like they are going to use a maglev track ramp to propel the rocket to escape velocity.

This falls, I’d say, into roughly the same category as space guns

It’s been pretty seriously studied and developed by NASA and others, but is pretty implausible for launching humans, because to reach escape speed at accelerations we can survive, the track must be impractically long. For example, a 6 g (about 60 m/s/s) acceleration (which a well-conditioned astronaut pilot might survive) would need , and a length of – about the distance between Los Angeles and Salt Lake City. A more ordinary-person-survivable 3 g acceleration would require 2 times that distance, about from central Kansas to the east coast.

Shortening the track to a more practical length, say 10000 m, and the acceleration required is , a non-human-survivable 640 g. Such a system could conceivable launch sturdy machines and materials, but not humans.

Most of the practical proposals for a magnetically accelerated space gun I’ve seen only take the place of the first rocket stage, allowing a single stage rocket to reach orbit.

A scheme similar to a maglev launcher is the “launch loop”, which are proposed to be about 2000000 m long and self-suspend at about 80000 altitude, neatly avoiding the problem of air resistance encountered near-surface space guns. We discussed it in the thread “the launch loop”.

[Experiment Garden]

I believe that the "Galactic Suite's" ramp launch system just takes the place of the first stage. The shuttle itself still has rockets. But this does make me wonder about whether or not it is feasible from an acceleration point of view.

[Pyrotex]

The electro-magnetic rail-gun idea of replacing the massive first stage with a reusable ground facility, goes back a long way. Robert Heinlein championed the use of rail-guns in some of his novels, including The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, and in his short stories. The problems of using rail-guns have been sumarized above. Add to that the fact that such a huge ground facility (likely to be tens of kilometers long) will require an ARMY of people to maintain and repair it.

But this was exactly the reason the Space Shuttle was so expensive. It required an ARMY of people to maintain and repair it. 20,000 engineers, with salaries of $100,000 per year (that includes benefits, insurance and medical) amounts to $2 Billion per year! Add to that the cost of maintaining the buildings, laboratories, utilities and infrastructure: another $2 Billion per year. That's $4 Billion a year even if you never do a launch at all!!!!