@yogthos Sadly the article is behind a paywall, so I have to make some educated guesses. This idea has got multiple problems. First thing is that especially when you want to transport people (like said in the article), the g-load is really limited. This means that your rail gun would had to be incredibly long to speed up the plane to a significant speed. Remember that you need to travel at 25,000 km/h to stay in orbit.
But even when you sped up to such a speed, you would experience a ton of drag because of the air resistance. It is only feasible to really speed up in higher regions (> 70-80km). So you would need some kind of first stage that had to carry some kind of a second stage to that region, so that it could accelerate from there. But this is exactly the concept that is used by rockets like the Falcon9/Falcon Heavy or Rocket Labs Electron, who all perform a stage separation in that region and perform a RTLS or controlled splash down to recover the first stage.
Also you would had only a single possible orbit here. But in reality there are a bunch of different interesting orbits out there.
Then just think about the costs. Just calculate how much launches with systems like the F9 or the upcoming Neutron you would have to perform, to even reach the break even point.
here’s a full article so you don’t have to speculate https://archive.ph/KbL8c
deleted by creator
This is completely different from what Branson is doing which is tourism for rich people. The proposal here is to launch large planes to the edge of atmosphere for rapid transportation.
deleted by creator
If you bother reading the article you’ll see that the motivation here is to save fuel. It’s a lot cheaper to use an electromagnetic launcher to launch the plane.
@yogthos @goatsarah You would had to enter hypersonic regime at ground level to even have got the possibility to reach the edge of space. Just imagine the sonic boom from that … Also think about the thermal protection that would be needed for your device to withstand the air friction.
Again, I’m sure actual engineers designing this stuff have in fact thought about these things.
deleted by creator
I love how you think you know more about the subject than the actual engineers building this stuff. 😂
@yogthos @goatsarah Thing is: This idea is not new. People have thought about it for a long time. And in the end they all came to the same conclusion: it isn’t worth it.
Thing is that the west stopped making any ambitious engineering projects. The idea isn’t new, but the will to put these kinds of things in practice doesn’t exist outside of China.