Or, "how I learned to stop worrying and love the railgun":Everyone today in nerd world (where I live) was talking today about the penultimate US space shuttle launch, trying desperately to save their 'end of an era' chatter for the final launch of Atlantis. It's days like this that I often think of the scene in "Phenomenon" with John Travolta, where he is frustrated that he's got ideas with no outlet. Little does he really know at that point that the more frustrating thing is not even getting other's to listen to your ideas, but making them believe in them enough to contribute time or money, or making them happen before someone else gets to it, or in a cost effective way if at all. All those bits are much more tricky and frustrating. Ideas are a dime a dozen.
Well in the spirit of American manned space exploration - or global manned space exploration, here's a free idea for America, and for the world. The problem with rail guns, you see, is the acceleration. Even Jules Verne knew that unless we could overcome that, it would kill us, or damage whatever components we need to transport. Ballistic technologies are limited to the softly accelerating oxidizing fuel rockets, expensive as they are. But we get to use words like "turbopump" so that's cool.
But there's another dimension to this - the part where we accelerate out of low earth orbit, LEO, and head for the stars. Here's how we could make that part cheaper.
Start by launching a slug into space. The slug is a metal jacketed piece of ice or liquid water. The slug goes up into leo and is captured by an unmanned satellite. The satellite unfurls it's big 'ol solar panels, and gets to work turning water from the slug into gas - H and O - using solar energy. When I was a kid, I asked my dad "how did you breath on the submarine?" He said that they used electrolysis and split the water up with electricity from the nuclear reactor, and dumped the hydrogen overboard. I asked why they would dump perfectly good hydrogen overboard when they could burn it for electricity, and I'll never forget the look on his face. "Well then we'd just have more water again."
We'd still need to get people and equipment into leo the old fashioned way - rockets and stuff. But we wouldn't have to wait for something exotic like a space elevator to bring some of the costs down, and we'd finally have a use for that kick-ass rail gun technology that we've been working on since old Gerald Bull tried to sell his supergun to the Iraqis. People have been talking a lot today about America and manned space flight, and maybe what we really need is for us all to open up our intellectual wallets a little and reach for the stars.
1 comment:
Yes! I'm waiting for the space elevator described in the Red Mars series. A lot of the science was spot on...save the Martians bit :)
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