"Slingatron" To Hurl Payloads Into Orbit 438
cylonlover writes "People have been shooting things into space since the 1940s, but in every case this has involved using rockets. This works, but it's incredibly expensive with the cheapest launch costs hovering around $2,000 per pound. This is in part because almost every bit of the rocket is either destroyed or rendered unusable once it has put the payload into orbit. Reusable launch vehicles like the SpaceX Grasshopper offer one way to bring costs down, but another approach is to dump the rockets altogether and hurl payloads into orbit. That's what HyperV Technologies Corp. of Chantilly, Virginia is hoping to achieve with a 'mechanical hypervelocity mass accelerator' called the slingatron."
I'll save you some reading (Score:5, Informative)
It's a Kickstarter campaign.
Smells like bullshit (Score:2, Informative)
It is a lot more complicated than a railgun or coilgun, suffers from erosion issues nonetheless, so what is the advantage? That it sounds like something out of a Dilbert story?
Re:60,000Gs ? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:I'll save you some reading (Score:4, Informative)
A kickstarter for a version that'll launch 1lb loads up to a small portion of the speed of sound. You're not getting anything in to orbit on the back of this, just helping this guy make a marginally more convincing case to bigger funding agencies. Although if the physics and engineering made sense, I'm not sure why a marginally larger prototype than the ones they already have is needed.
Re:Limited cargo use (Score:5, Informative)
From the article:
It’s questionable whether any rocket system could survive such stresses and there’s certainly no chance of a slingatron being used on a manned mission because it would turn an astronaut into astronaut pudding. Only the most solid state and hardened of satellites built along the lines of an electronic artillery shell fuse would have a chance of survival. The developers say that a larger slingatron would reduce the forces, but even with a reduction by a factor of 10,000, it would still be restricted to very robust cargoes. This makes it mainly attractive for raw materials, such as radiation shielding, fuel, water, and other raw materials.
Re:My oh my (Score:3, Informative)
Re:My oh my (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Mass Drivers as Alternatives? (Score:4, Informative)
Real numbers would be much worse. For a muzzle V of 10km/s they are 77% worse.
The slingshot is in fact a far less realistic approach, we could build a mag train with these specs if we were so inclined to sink the billions it would cost to do so. But the slingshot has very large forces between the "track" and the projectile while still requiring a massive track that all moves!
Personally if we are going to dream then a launch loop is my preferred "rockets suck" alternative.
By the way Rockets don't suck. They do what they do well. Far better than anything else at this point. There is no reason they have to be as expensive as they currently are.
Re:Limited cargo use (Score:3, Informative)
Robert Forward used such tanks in Dragon's Egg, and Heinlein used them in Starship Troopers. Neither story subjected the people in the tanks 60,000g's though.