[Dan Evans]

Imagine a surplus B-52 carrier aircraft launching a rocket plane that's a quarter the weight of the shuttle orbiter but has the same cargo capacity.

Doesn't the air force launch satellites this way now? You gain a little advantage by getting altitude and above much of the atmosphere, but the 90% of work that has to be done is in accelerating to over 17,000 mph. That takes a great big rocket.

I don't think the breakthrough in cost per pound is going to come from rockets as much as from scram-jets or something more exotic. All that mass costs money. Some people have pointed out that the cost of the fuel for a rocket is insignificant. But the real cost is in the container for that fuel and the infrastructure to assemble the container and launch it.

[theFIRMbss]

>I don't think the breakthrough in cost per pound is going to come from rockets as much as from scram-jets or something more exotic

"Our Universe is a four-dimensional rotating
hypersphere. The rotation creates a centripetal
acceleration which is generally orthogonal to the
Universe's space in every point and not perceived by the
objects of the Universe. However, the centripetal
acceleration, along with the elastic reaction of the space,
causes curving of the space in vicinity of massive bodies.
As a result, in the curved areas the acceleration is not
orthogonal to the space, which appears to the Universe's
objects as gravity."

"Big Spin" Model of Gravity by Sergey Ivanenko