With gravity being on of the weakest forces known...

Chemical energy is the densest energy we have that doesn't blow things apart.

many other suggestions have been proposed, but turns out that space travel/the fusion meme fairly irrelevant, and current scientific models don't really lend themselves to any better ideas right now

unless you believe the emd meme and that quantum vacuums have strange unforeseen properties

You can invest in orbital ring abd lift objects to that hight using elevators and than accelerate to orbital(or whatever) speed using the energy from the ring that is supplied from earth

This is what I am aware of, but it frustrates me. I feel more like a whiny toddler in this post than anything else. I just hate this feeling of being tied down.

I know others have asked this question to no avail, but that does not mean an answer does not exist. I don't even know where to start to look.
I want to believe the emd thing so bad, but I know it is highly unlikely anything real comes from it.

What would upkeep on such a thing cost? Any less than our current way of leaving Earth?

again. It is possible with current tech. No need for carbon nanotubes or sumtin. It works by sending lots of small objects like ball bearings at orbital velocity thru a tube around earth which is stationary relative to ground. The tube is supported on those objects an can also support some cargo an can be anchored to ground.

Why are we not doing this then? What is the roadblock?

Dunno. But it should cut costs of launching to couple dollars per kg. That should pay it out. Watch Isaac Arthur on yt. He has a series of videos dedicated to getting people to space without rockets.

>It is possible with current tech.

>a tube around earth

LOL

let me gauss, and then we build a Dyson sphere around the Sun

It's fucking expensive to make it. But once it is made, assuming you have a reason to go to space very often, it should pay itself off.

You are speaking of couple of orders of magnitude of difference. The tube can be 5-10cm in diameter.

Watch Isaac Arthur on yt. Start there.

Thanks for the suggestion. Checking it out.

Yes it sucks. But there's simply no other options. Even worse, if the earth was something like 2% heavier, it would be impossible to make it to orbit with rockets either. We'd still be completely stuck.

>The tube can be 5-10cm in diameter.
If the tube is that thin how the fuck are you going to hoist anything from it? It would probably just fall apart in orbit under it's own weight.

It's filled with ball bearings that are traveling at orbital velocity in circular orbit. The tube is supended on them

Rockets are utter waste of resources and incredibly outdated and dangerous technology. It's like cavemen trying to cross sea on a raft. Utterly pointless. There's absolutely no meaning in bothering with space until we have clean, safe, and efficient means of travel. Be that anti-gravity drives or something else.

> lift cargo up to small tube
> tube is pulled out of orbit towards the earth
WOW

>anti-gravity drives

>>/x/ is that way

How does that make a difference? Except for the fact that the tube would be pretty much impossible to make is a what where it wouldn't instantly disintegrate. a 10cm tube will metal balls traveling 8km per second inside?

>incredibly outdated
Oh really? I didn't realise. What's replaced them as means of space travel?

>ball bearings that are traveling at orbital velocity

would literally explode in a microsecond

there is no known or proposed material that can withstand orbital scale forces or support its own shape for orbital scale lengths

It would make literally no difference at all but i hoped that by shoving in some inane ramblings you might buy it.

Rockets are still very much in their infancy.

In the future there will be reusable rockets with daily launch rates, able to put thousands of tons per year into orbit at a cost approaching the cost of fuel. This requires no major breakthroughs in technology and is more engineering than science.

Space elevator is held back by materials.
What we could do currently is launch loop.
>Launch loops are intended to achieve non-rocket spacelaunch of vehicles weighing 5 metric tons by electromagnetically accelerating them so that they are projected into Earth orbit or even beyond. This would be achieved by the flat part of the cable which forms an acceleration track above the atmosphere.

Is that like a tube that goes into space or something?

> daily launch rates
Even with easily reusable rockets the amount of repair, replacement, testing and refuelling and loading would still make the turnaround weeks.

Based on what exactly? Elon plans to have the turn around be a few hours.

Elon plans nothing more than getting ilovescience.com headlines.

Regardless, I don't see why his plan for a turn around time of hours isn't feasible. besides
>I just don't feel like it's possible because no one did it before.

Id say routine turnaround of a few days is entirely possible. Then there will not be only one such rocket operating at the same time, but several. So one launch every day is not unrealistic, as long as there is demand for such launch rates.

Current advanced fighter jets take days to be fit for launch again and their requirements aren't nearly as complex as a space ship. Obviously if they have several ships at once then a launch could be every day but that isn't what was suggested.

>Current advanced fighter jets take days to be fit for launch again and their requirements aren't nearly as complex as a space ship.
Yes.. but they are also quite different vehicles. Airliners are complex too and don't take much time to refly, so I don't see the point of analogies like this.

Jet planes are much closer to the stress that space ships are put under, not airliners. A space rocket is only ever going to need more maintenance than fighter jets.

Right. Still kinda of a weak argument though. Elon claims that pretty much all the components on the new Falcons should be able to refly 100 times at least without needing any maintenance, and I believe he said all components should be able to do at least 10 flights. I just gather he wouldn't have claimed this if he didn't have some reason to think it was true. Especially considering they've flown a few 1st stages now.

Maybe your right and it's just like a jet fighter. Or maybe falcons are more robust to high stresses of spaceflight than fighter jets are for their own flights.

what are:
>space elevators
>mass drivers
>spaceplanes
>sky hooks
>launch loops
>orbital rings

I'll tell you what they are. They're either currently unfeasible or just not as good as rockets.

Maybe, but id wait until we see it for real. Until then it's just another hyperloop.

The launch loop is essentially a partial orbital ring.

There's still problems with it, such as handling waves propagating along it and such, but it's probably one of the more feasible mega structures for getting into space.

Fair enough. I don't doubt there's a real possibility Elon won't ever get his 6 hours turnaround time. But it sounds at least reasonably possible right now.

Well first time posting on this board.
No other way apart from chemical rockets

>Project Orion
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propulsion)

Can literally transport a colony of more than a 100 people to any planet in our solar system

>Can even reach other starts

Developed more than 60 years ago.

Not fired since requires burning 1000 nukes in atmosphere.
Still NASA's only method of getting a colony (100 people + equipment) to another planet.

Not even that expensive if you use the nukes you already have.

Dont even get me started on the other technologies they are keeping secret.

I came here to literally post this. There is some cool footage on YouTube about this project, some engineers are messing around with small models, and blowing up shit underneath them to make them shoot up.

I swear to god, being an american scientist in the fifties and sixties was the good life. Unlimited funding for even the most far fetched and unrealistic proposals, just like this one.

youtube.com/watch?v=xYoLcJuBtOw

Maybe we should investigate antigravity.

Rockets are fine. With nothing to push off of in space all you can do to gain momentum is jettison mass. Whether it's photons, ionized gas or plain old hydrogen it's all the same in principle.

What we should be doing is building closed cycle, gas core NTGs like pic related. They have specific impulses measured in the thousands and can achieve 1:1 thrust to weight ratios while under 1g and at sea level atmospheric density. They actually get pretty close to 50/50 fuel to payload ratios and can definitely be built with todays technology (with some heavy R&D costs obviously).

But they're nuclear powered and nuclear powered anything is unbuildable because the public has been taught that nukes are evil and scary for the last 50 years. Hippies ruin everything, man.

Nice trips, but gravity doesnt exist.

If anything it's probably blocked by some weapon treaty.

We don't need all this bullshit ramps elevators and nuclear propulsion when we have electromagnetic propulsion in the works like EM drive

You've never in your life played with magnets have you?

>Space
>Elevator
>ELEVATOR
Surely you must know what that looks like even if you've never been in one, you've watched tv, seen movies, its like an elevator, an elevator
>a lift
>a shaft
Surely your familiar with shafts right?

EM drive's got shit for propulsion, son.

>You've never in your life played with magnets have you?
its sci, of course they havent
'Sigh' Nice troll
You first
lol

EM drives never been tested in space has it?
In that case we don't know how it will perform, if indeed it does work at all
>wait for all the EM nuts to flood into the thread in 3....2.... 1......

Well, there's always the space gun. It probably will fuck up every payload but theoretically it can put satellites into orbit extremely cheaply.

no

Fuck this space gun shit

Some em drives got milli Newton's of propulsion from hundreds or tens of Watts. It depends on how the waves bounce around inside.

gravity is the strongest force because of the sheer scale of it

It can work using decades old materials technology. Not really any crazier than other ideas here.

There are other proposed propulsion methods but all are a little out of reach at the moment.
Building a bit metal tube and putting it on a bunch of explodey is about as technologically advanced as we are at the moment.

Actually aren't Lightsails a thing now? That's metal as fuck. That's where you build a bunch of really small really thin paper airplanes and hit them with a bunch of lasers until they reach the speed of light

Far off into the future we could see those very lasers pointed at each other to create a super black hole made of pure light that shoots out raw power that we can harness for our big metal straws in space

Even further on we could make stuff and opposite stuff touch each other to make a lot of fast stuff.

how can it be made structurally sound