Magleving up Chimborazo

The main technical limitation is the switching speeds of the power switches.

Michael Combs has info about that I believe. I am not sure whether state of the art power switches are fast enough.

I am not sure whether sufficient acceleration has been demonstrated as yet. I don't really have any technical info. I just got involved in a debate on sci.space.policy once on the subject of mass drivers that led to me contacting Dr. Les Snively, who had worked on mass drivers with O'Neill. This led to a short article which got published in Space Front. The argument had been made that switching speed limitations would forever limit mass driver velocities to not only well below what was needed for Earth escape, but even for lunar escape. Dr. Snively seemed to feel that O'Neill had come up with good solutions to those problems. The mass driver models built thus far have demonstrated the accelerations desired, but not the velocities. That would require a full-length driver. Michael, does SSI have a mass driver FAQ anywhere which addresses these issues ? Not to my knowledge. If such existed, I would certainly have added it to the SSI website.

Regards,

Mike Combs