Maglev launchers - hanging from high-altitude balloons?
Why couldn't you take a large array of balloons / blimps / dirigibles / etc., coat their upper surfaces with solar cells, suspend a magnetic launch tube underneath, float your payload into high altitude, and launch it at relatively low power (limit 7 G's) from up where the air is thin? Sure, you'd have to have a platform several miles long to make the EM launcher long enough to accelerate a payload at that low a G-load. Oh, well, it's not any farther out than building a true space elevator. Plus you could use the shorter segments of the launcher to launch ultra-high-G force payloads even while construction of the full launcher is in progress. If you built it long enough you probably could lower the power enough to launch at 3 G's and move personnel into orbit. I would suggest ceramic watches, though.
Then you could have lift balloons on tethers going up to the launch platform every few minutes with a new payload. You use the same carbon nano-tube technology proposed for space elevators to tether the platform and the lifter balloons to one spot on the Earth.
Additionally, you could tether wind-generators in the jet stream or trade winds below the launch platform and have many megawatts of relatively cheap electricity to power the whole system.
It might be easier to put together in the short term than a true space elevator, but serve pretty much the same function. Now suddenly you've got a doable system to launch several payloads an hour instead of a year. It's got to be cheaper than the chemical rockets we're using now.
Dan Stafford
A personal quest to promote the use of wind energy and hydrogen technology in the Great Lakes area of the United States. The Great Lakes area is in a unique position to become an energy exporting region through these and other renewable energy technologies. *Update 2014: Just do it everywhere - Dan*
No comments:
Post a Comment