Steven Den Beste Strawman

wanted to deliver mass driver payloads, NOT about the L-2 point. I think you misunderstand me. Den Beste was criticizing the High Frontier proposal. That's a very specific proposal with lots of specific points and details. One of them was the mass drivers would be used to deliver lunar ores from the surface up to a "catcher" stationed at the L-2 point. Once the catcher had accumulated a full load of ore, it would then slide off the L-2 point and, using either a rotary pellet launcher or mass driver reaction engine for propulsion, deliver the load to an orbital ore refinery. (At an early point of this research, that refinery would have been at L-5. At a later point, they had decided a circular High Earth Orbit about half thediameter of lunar orbit would be better, but that's irrelevant to my point.) Den Beste got this confused and assumed (or misremembered) that the proposal had been to launch ore straight from the lunar surface to L-5. Thus his argument fit the definition of a straw man since he was criticizing a proposal which was in fact different from the one actually made. If the Moons gravity would reduce the escape velocity to a km an hour,
that would happen near the Moon and the driver payload would need 150
million hours (about 17123 years) to do those 150 million km above but
I dont think L5 could be reached with a simple straight one time mass
driver shot. I guess at least two accelerations and one with direction
change would be needed. You're doing the same thing he was doing, easily trouncing a proposition which is different from the one originally proposed. The mass driver is not intended to deliver the ore to the ore refinery. It only delivers the ore to a catcher at L-2. The catcher in turn uses some small faction of that payload as reaction mass tohaul the ore to the refinery.