From: Adrian Tymes (wingcat@pacbell.net)
Date: Tue Aug 20 2002 - 14:34:42 MDT
Reason wrote:
>>I would assign a fairly high probability to this project taking more than
>>15 years. I will be disappointed and moderately surprised if it
>>isn't done
>>within 25 years. Caveat: I haven't really sat down and thought carefully
>>through plausible scenarios for the development of the space elevator. As
>>for the singularity, I find that beast far more amorphous and
>>blurred than
>>most here. Still, I would have to say that a space elevator would be
>>constructed before we could say we were in or entering a singularity.
>
> Hold up here. Wouldn't be easier at the moment to ("just") start running a
> rail gun up the side of a big equatorial mountain for cheaper ground to
> orbit stuff? I mean, if we're talking large up front capital investment in
> systems and all that. Getting up does seem to be a costlier process than
> getting down again...
>
> I seem to recall someone had one of these mountainside railguns in their
> hard sci-fi novel. Can't recall who. I'm sure one of the less busy list math
> types could tell me why this is/isn't a viable option :)
The problem is acceleration, specifically the Gs you would have to put
on a cargo to launch it that way since you can only accelerate it over
the few kilometer length of the gun. (There aren't really any good
mountains on which to put a gun that give, say, 100 km length.) Hard
cargoes, like satellites, can possibly be engineered to withstand that,
but this side of uploading (which, IMO, will likely take more than 15
years to achieve), living passengers are straight out. Also, the gun
can not be easily rotated or otherwise adjusted to launch into
significantly different orbits. (Ditto the space elevator, but then,
full-length "launches" from there tend to escape Earth's orbit but stay
in the plane of most of this solar system's planets, and exact starting
position and direction of travel is a matter of picking day of the year
and time of day respectively.)
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