I think we should go the, “The moon is a harsh mistress,” route and set up mining and manufacturing plants on the moon itself. Saves the cost and environmental impact of having to lift everything up from the surface. Minus the worker exploitation, of course.
Idk if anyone has actually crunched the numbers on the horizontal launch system the book uses, but in a nutshell they basically shaved the top off of some mountains on the equator and made a gigantic rail gun to get ships closer to escape velocity before boosters are needed.
I’m gonna try to crunch some numbers
Assuming you want a semimajor axis of 1100 miles, just a few miles above the surface, you need to accelerate to about 1600 m/s
Let’s say our astronauts are extremely well trained, and can handle 10 gs. The Railgun would need to accelerate them to 1600 m/s. Divided by 100 m/s^2 means they’ll be accelerating for about 16 seconds. That’s as much as I can math on my own, so I’m gonna defer to this calculator, which says you need to accelerate over a distance of about 13 kilometers. That’s a big railgun.
If they only used it for materials and unmanned satellites, then a more reasonably sized 1 km railgun would accelerate the payload at around 130 gs. An even more reasonable 100 meter long railgun (just 5 times longer than real life railguns) would reach about 1300 gs, which isn’t bonkers high if the satellite is built for it, but would change any living thing trying to hitch a ride from biology to physics
ETA: Escape velocity is √2 times circular orbit velocity, for math and science reasons. This railgun would need to accelerate payloads to around 2250 m/2. The human railgun would need to be 25 kilometers long, and the astronauts would be experiencing 10 gs for about 22 seconds. Couldn’t pay me enough.
Who am I kidding, I’d literally die for a chance to visit the moon
A skyhook would be a lot easier to implement on the moon than Earth (no atmosphere and 1/6 gravity).
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Launching a follow-on to the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) on Starship, for example, could unshackle the mission from onerous mass and volume constraints, which typically drive up complexity and cost, a panel of three astronomers recently told the National Academies’ Committee on Astronomy and Astrophysics.
“The availability of greater mass and volume capability, at lower cost, enlarges the design space,” said Charles Lawrence, the chief scientist for astronomy and physics at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
The presentation was given last week alongside Martin Elvis, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and Sara Seager, an astrophysicist and planetary scientist at MIT.
But astronomers are starting to get serious in planning for rockets like the Starship, or Blue Origin’s New Glenn with a slightly smaller 7-meter payload fairing, to be available to loft the next generation of big space telescopes.
In this survey, known in shorthand as Astro2020, a distinguished panel of scientists laid out a roadmap for NASA to spend the bulk of the 2020s developing technologies and designs for the next series of “great observatories” that will follow the likes of Hubble, Chandra, James Webb, and the Roman Space Telescope scheduled for launch in 2027.
First should be a large telescope called the Habitable Worlds Observatory, which would be comparable in size to Webb with a primary mirror around 6 meters (20 feet) across and a coronagraph or a starshade to blot out starlight, enabling direct observations of planets around other stars, or exoplanets.
The original article contains 468 words, the summary contains 246 words. Saved 47%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
