Darin Sunley writes:
> Even if we HAD a tower right up to LEO, you would still have to spend approx
> 80% of the energy (something in this neighborhood anyways) to get from the
> top of that tower to a stable orbit at that altitude.
Then a linear mass driver built on the slope of something very much
gentle-slope-but-high-vulcano-pyramidal (Africa? Hawaii? Too bad we
don't have Olympus Mons hereabouts) within an evacuated tunnel seems
to make more sense.
Of course it's only good for hauling small packets of high-g resistant
stuff (raw materials or machine parts, brawny microsats). Otoh, since
there is tactical atomic artillery, shockproof electronics isn't an
obvious impossibility.
If you really have to haul monkeys, hypersonic two-stage LEO shuttle
designs have more than enough capacity.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu Jul 27 2000 - 14:04:25 MDT