Times have never been more promising for proponents of commercial spaceflight.

When the Bush administration announced a new mission for NASA in January 2004, many dismissed it as a cynical P.R. ploy. Yet it was the first time a U.S. administration had declared that the country's policy on manned space exploration was to go into space and keep going (see "Toward a New Vision of Manned Spaceflight").

Given that ambition, the "Report of the President's Commission on Implementation of United States Space Exploration Policy" -- also dubbed "A Journey to Inspire, Innovate, and Discover" -- charted an ostensibly reasonable course. It decreed that when construction on the International Space Station finished in 2010, the shuttle would be mothballed. By 2014, a new manned vehicle -- the crew exploration vehicle, or CEV -- would make its first flight. Astronauts would take the CEV to the Moon by 2020 and would head for Mars in the following decades. Since the Bush administration gave NASA a limited budget with which to achieve this, some said that the White House wasn't serious; others argued that the tightfistedness was justified, given the agency's history of overruns. In any case, NASA in 2005 announced a design for a four- to six-astronaut CEV resembling the Apollo command module, which would be boosted into space atop a revamped heavy lift vehicle (HLV). NASA's new boss, Michael Griffin, described the combo as "Apollo on steroids."

You are like "silent" Cal Coolidge, terse...EMSL means ElectroMagnetic Space Launch. This is a concept whereby you shoot small projectiles directly into earth orbit with some kind of electric cannon. During the mid 80s a small splinter group in the SDI/aerospace field took the orbiting KKV(Kinetic Kill Vehicle)concept and said : Hey, we can use this same idea of a space cannon to shoot 10kg artillery projectiles from grade right through the atmosphere and into LEO, almost like a machine gun. At Sandia they also had worked with pinched magnetic fields, using precisely timed explosives, to get a tiny mass up to 1 mps in just 12 ft of pipe, thus showing the way....So we looked at homopolar generators, rail guns, ultra capacitors, even my 1/2 mile diameter ring gun(it looks like a bicycle wheel)but the best idea(in my opinion)was the quenched superconducting rings. Gerard O'Neil at MIT had found that attraction works far better at centering than repulsion. Also all the components of the projectile were g-tested to 100,000g to 500,000g with only delicate things like clocks sustaining damage....So picture this : on Jarvis Island(on the equator south of Hawaii)you have a 200 meter long cannon at a 45 deg angle pointing east. Every minute a hypersonic projectile emerges(KA-BOOOOM). The nose has cast-in lithium beads for "sweating" during the 3 seconds of flight up thru the tropopause. 10kg/min x 60min/hr x 24hrs/day x 365days/yr = how many shuttle loads to LEO? Since 1kg is energy-worth(mv^2/2+mgh)9KWH at 8kps and 160km up, and you have a 10% system efficiency, that's how much vs postage vs $20,000/# via the 3g shuttle? We had it all worked out 20 years ago...Maybe you tell me why this ingenious STS concept didn't happen in the 1980s when it was technically feasible?

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