Power On Self Test: Lunar Launch Ramp

And this is how we will do it [Vanhoozer Studios]

1. [dargaud]

   OK, this thing is probably some (pretty looking) joke, but I always wonder at those projects using gigantic towers for whatever purpose, like launching in space or producing energy like the current Australian solar updraft project (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_updraft_tower)… why not build them out the side of a mountain ?!? Much cheaper and easier, yet this simple detail seems to escape the designers.

2. [Garr]

   Dargaud, I’m not sure how well you can prove your “cheap and easy” claim. But I believe (i.e. I can’t prove, and don’t claim this to be fact) that dragging material off a mountain is just as expensive, cumbersome and complicated as heaping it on the ground to build some structure.

3. [Anonymous]

   Flying 2 miles along and then a conversion from horizontal to vertical in about 8 truck lengths (based on drawing of truck). There’s a few problems here. Approaching escape velocity at ground level would produce metal liquidating temperatures. If that problem is solved, then the G forces would liquify any living beings aboard.

4. [bbonyx]

   @ #3 “Liquidating” – I do not think that word means what you think it means.
   

   That said, I want to read more of anything you write, as long as it is filled with everything around us being liquified directly from solid form. You paint a fun picture.

5. [pauldrye]

   Rocket, shmocket. If you’re going to do that anyway, just fire your payload out of a really large gun.

   @3 Anonymous: There are plenty of cargoes that are non-organic which can survive the roughly 1,000 gravities of acceleration you’d be up against over two miles of burn (though the corner down at the end is a concern). Going back to the example above, a couple of hundred Martlets were launched for testing and weather measuring purposes, several of them well over 100 km, and they had to put up with several thousand Gs.

   The technique was a contender against regular sounding rockets for quite a while.

   (Full disclosure: the item at the end of the link above is on my blog, but by coincidence Saturday’s topic was HARP’s penis issu^H^H^H guns)

6. [OM]

   …So, has anyone shown these guys When Worlds Collide yet?

7. [strider_mt2k]

   I sent my money to the folks at ACME but I didn’t get my plans yet.

8. [Xydexx]

   Agreeing with Strider MT2K. This has such a fantastic Wile E. Coyote look to it.