Mass drivers to launch spaceships redux

A maglev booster would be inclosed in a vacum tunnel. and if it is just freight the the tunnel can be shorter with the acceleration higher. You could leave the tunnel greater than orbital, by the time you are out of the atmosphere, low earth orbit. Then you can put on what ever low or high velocity means, ion drive, solar sail, orion nuclear etc.... It just seems the most important thing is to get out of gravity well as cheap as possible. best regards pete

Ok, I ment using a mass driver on the moon to launch spaceships. On
Earth there would be too much air friction to accelerate something to
escape velocity.
You can build a raunching ramp on Earth to give a speed boost to a
vehicle
and have the ramp curve up at the end. Oh course a shuttle mark II
might work out better
and you can use the fuel tanks to build things in orbit, but I digress.
How long would a ramp need to be on the moon to launch a spaceship
to escape velocity anyway? I imagine building it would be no worse than
building a
long rail of train tracks assuming no weird engineering problems. I
could be very wrong
though so if someone wants to work out the math I would be very
interested. I still
think it is a better idea than firing bags of dirt at a catcher but I
could be wrong about that too.

I think this can be solved by making sure the mass thrown out by the massdrivers have an orbit which will intersect with the sun. Use radioactive waste from earth and kill 2 birds with one stone.

I don't like using the mass driver as a propulsion system. It would
work fine but
it would leave a lot of meteorites flying around at high speeds. Space
debris is
dangerous! An inpact with a spacecraft could be catastrophic, like
being shot by a
tank shell, given a high enough kinetic energy. BOOM!!! Worse if it
was a bouncer.
A bouncer is a meteorite that enters the spacecraft but doesn't have
enough energy to leave so it "bounces around" inside the spacecraft
making a bloody mess, literally!
Space garbage is a big problem. A fleck of paint gouged the shuttle's
window
and almost punctured it. Dangerous.
Well that is my 2 cents.
Darkstar