2 ms·
Mass Driver
- PaulHoule 5y agoThe US Navy has a railgun with a 2.5 km/sec muzzle velocity that would fit on a ship. A 3.5 km/sec gun could shoot payloads from the surface of the moon to the Earth-Moon L1 and L2 points. That railgun would struggle to get 1000 shots per barrel, a coilgun would be more practical but somewhat larger. Either way the O'Neill era picture of the mile-long mass driver is so 1976, really it looks more like the Paris Gun. Something that would fit on a SpaceX Starship should be able to put up at least a rail car worth of freight a day.
- pmoriarty 5y agoThere's an interesting startup called SpinLaunch[1] which is "working on mass accelerator technology to move payloads to space." "At Spaceport America in New Mexico on 22 October 2021, SpinLaunch conducted the first vertical test of their accelerator at 20% of its full power capacity, hurling a 10-foot (3.0 m) long passive projectile to an altitude of "tens of thousands of feet". This test accelerator is 108 ft (33 m) in diameter, which makes it a one-third scale of the operational system that is being designed." [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpinLaunch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpinLaunch