An Idea...

Greetings and Happy New Year,

There are certain advantages of expendable launch
vehicles, especially if a very large number are made.
However I support the idea of a completely new launch
system. One that launches payload to space
electro-magnetically (E-M). There are several
versions, but the main advantage is that this system
"could" reduce the price per pound (kilogram) to the
tens of dollars .vs. the current thousands of dollars.
This low price depends of course on having enough
customers to insure adequate usage. The smallest (and
cheapest) E-M launcher, is called the Telephone Pole
Launcher (TPL) (invented by Henry Kolm in the 70s),
launches telephone pole shaped craft to Highly
Eccentric Earth Orbit (HEEO) of about 1 ton payload
(1.5 ton gross), at the rate of up to 4 per minute.
This give a maximum capacity of about 6000 tons per
day! It would need at least 600 tons per day of cargo
to be economically feasible.

So the next question are who are the potential
customers (other than colonists and space-settlers who
have great ideas but limited wallets)?

One customer would be the Space Gas Station (SGS) that
converts water ice into LOX and LH2 which it sells to
NASA and others. But these guys would use no more
than 10 tones per day, even when we start going to
Mars.

I think the main customer would be the Space Power
Satellite (SPS) Consortium, who plan to build 100s of
10-100 Gigawatt power SPSs and beam the power down to
earth. This is a great idea in that it would remove
one of the major sources of CO2, which causes global
warming. The problem is that SPSs won't be
economically feasible until the cost of power goes
over $0.25 per KW-Hr. And with new sources of
methane-hydrates, that cost is likely to stay around
$0.05 for the next 50 years or so.

As I see it, the only way to avoid this problem is for
the governments of our planet to get together and
recognize the seriousness of global warming and the
advantages of SPSs and to tax energy production that
releases CO2 and use this money for SPSs, starting
with E-M Launch systems.

I know all this has been said before, but it needs to
be repeated again and again until politicians hear it
and understand it.

Dave Handwerk
Mechanical and Aerospace Engineer

--- ralphbuttigieg wrote: