Orbital launch rail guns

yea this seems silly. i was only imagining shooting stuff from a high mountain in ecuador.

It's just R=exp(dV/Ve)
Space shuttle main engines have a specific impulse of 453 seconds in vacuum. 4440 meters/sec.
Required dV (including drag and gravity losses) is about 9400 meters/sec. R =8.31
Reducing that by, say, 20% means the accelerator has to supply 990 meters/sec.
If limited to 4 gee, the track has to be 12.5 km long.
Something that long has to be straight and nearly horizontal, so you'd lose some of the gain to increased drag in the lower atmosphere.

The POINT is that you don't go fast at low altitude because "max Q" will destroy your vehicle and you waste more & more to air drag

Cost, reasons and capabilities to be in space that will pay for the silly sized investment, and the development of the technology, but i guess hyperloop is a step in that direction. Once the technology is ready to harvest asteroids worth hundreds of trillions it won't take long. There is also ion thrusters removing need for propellant or massive structures but they aren't quite there yet.

>>While NASA has no plans to bring the massive asteroid home and lacks the technology to mine it, Elkins-Tanton calculates that the iron in 16 Psyche would be worth $10,000 quadrillion, Global News reported. That's right, $10,000 quadrillion, as in 15 more zeros.

Goodbye economy as we know it

>thats what energy storage is for
user, if you had a solution for high efficiency, practical energy storage on this scale, you would solve the global energy crisis overnight.

The coolest thing about asteroid harvesting is that you can just use the asteroid as propellant. All you need is absurd amounts of energy and / or time.

user, the accelerator doesn't need to operate all the

Hrmm...but why space when speed of light won't cut it?

Why space mine when you can make any element out of hygrogen?...first make hologram, then comes holodeck/replicator. Stack photons using filters.

Silly simple.