Posted on 10/03/2017 10:07:35 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
While stuck in traffic in 1961, James Powell, a young researcher at Brookhaven National Laboratory came up with the idea of using powerful magnets to lift and propel massive passenger-carrying cars. Over the next seven years, he and his colleague Gordon Danby spent their spare time piecing together a concept. They obtained a patent for the breakthrough in 1968. Powell and Danby's magnetic levitation, or maglev, technology must have seemed like magic back then, but it is now being used to move large trains at speeds up to 375 miles per hour!
Not content to rest on this sole accomplishment, the 84-year-old Powell now has grander ambitions for his maglev breakthrough. In 2001, he teamed up with George Maise, an aeronautical engineer and 23-year veteran of Brookhaven National Laboratory, to put forth an idea to revolutionize space launches: StarTram.
StarTram is just as audacious as its name implies. It boils down to building a maglev train to outer space. Here's how it works: Magnetically-levitated spacecraft will be propelled inside a curved tube aimed skyward. All air will be evacuated from the tube in order to eliminate drag. Craft will exit the lengthy tube at a speed of 8.8 kilometers per second in order to escape Earth's atmosphere. A generation-1 StarTram design intended to launch cargo vessels will feature a 81-mile tube built up the side of a mountain to reach a launch altitude of 12,0000 to 20,000 feet. The Andes Mountains of Chile or the White Sands Missile Range of southern New Mexico might be ideal locations. Powell estimates that spacecraft could be launched every hour, carrying upwards of seventy tons of cargo per launch at a cost of just $20 to $50 per kilogram....
(Excerpt) Read more at realclearscience.com ...
“A generation-1 StarTram design intended to launch cargo vessels will feature a 81-mile tube built up the side of a mountain to reach a launch altitude of 12,0000 to 20,000 feet. The Andes Mountains of Chile or the White Sands Missile Range of southern New Mexico might be ideal locations.”
An 81 mile underground tube = financially impractical.
Cost, cost, cost is ALWAYS a consideration and cannot be dismissed just because the idea sounds “neat”. Witness the Concorde supersonic airliner. Cool idea, financially impractical.
For a projected 81 mile trip, the trip/launch would take about 20 seconds.
No human could survive that kind of acceleration.
Yes!
It took something like 40 launches to build the ISS. Using BFR and Bigelo Aerospace’s largest modules, it would only take two launches to build another space station of equal inside volume.
Ping
The answer to headlines that
pose a question is usually “no.”
Sounds like they are onto something. I doubt they are the first to think of it, since it seemed like an old idea when I posted some wild speculation on FR a couple of years ago. Thanks 2ndDivisionVet.
Read the same about railguns years ago.
Oh, I don't know. The Channel Tunnel is 31 miles long, so I don't think the tunneling technology is going to be the long pole in tent for this project.
Sealing the tunnel so it can be evacuated, actually evacuating 81 miles of atmosphere from the tunnel, and the aforementioned electromagnetic drive energy generation, storage, and delivery challenges would kill the project long before digging an 81 mile long tunnel would.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.