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To: PapaBear3625

“Being able to get a spacecraft to that platform without having to achieve full orbital velocity would save a lot of fuel.”

You’d save much more fuel just lifting a rocket to the upper atmosphere with a dirigible and then launching it from there, where you could avoid 90% of the atmospheric resistance, since that is where the really big fuel cost comes from. Even better, dirigible technology is old news, so we can almost certainly build something like that without developing much new technology, we just need to work out the engineering.


40 posted on 09/10/2018 12:30:32 PM PDT by Boogieman
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To: Boogieman
Virgin Galactic's approach is to have a jet mothercraft carry the rocket above most of the atmosphere.


49 posted on 09/10/2018 1:30:05 PM PDT by PapaBear3625 ("It rubs the rainbow on it's skin or it gets the diversity again!")
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