The Real Story Behind NASA’s Resurrected Space Plane

The aviation and space press buzzed last week with the news that NASA had quietly moved its two long-grounded X-34 space planes from open storage at the space agency’s Dryden center — located on Edwards Air Force Base in California — to a test pilot school in the Mojave Desert. At the desert facility, the mid-’90s-vintage, robotic X-34s would be inspected to determine if they were capable of flying again. It seemed that NASA was eying a dramatic return to the business of fast, cheap space access using a reusable, airplane-style vehicle — something the Air Force has enthusiastically embraced with its mysterious X-37B spacecraft.

The truth, it turns out, is a bit more complicated, even confusing — but no less exciting. If everything works out, the X-34s might help pioneer not just an emerging method of accessing space, but a new space-exploration business model, as well.

A Wednesday call to Orbital Sciences, the original manufacturers of the X-34, resulted in a brief conversation with a bemused company official. Barry Berneski, Orbital’s communications director, said he had read the X-34 news, but had heard nothing on the subject from inside the firm. “They might be just trying get it out of Edwards’ valuable real estate,” Berneski said of the 59-foot-long space planes, only one of which ever flew — and just once — before the program was canceled on cost grounds in 2001.


In fact, real estate has been a factor in the X-34s’ moves over the years, Dryden official Alan Brown said on Wednesday. After the program’s termination, NASA transferred the space plane prototypes to the Air Force, “which thought it might use them but never did,” Brown said. “When the Air Force needed room in the hangar, they were moved to a bombing range and sat out there deteriorating for several years.” The two bots luckily avoided getting bombed, and earlier this year NASA moved them back to its side of Edwards. “They were sitting there a while,” Brown mused.

more

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/11/the-real-story-behind-nasas-resurrected-space-plane/

Remember how Chimpy talked about re-energizing the space program and going to Mars? Turns out that was just jaw-bonin' BS like everything else.

Frying a Few Million Islamics for his Corporate Oil Buddies

Here is a repeat of a post I did a while back that gives an overview of the MagLev launch system. It would bring costs down from $10,000 per pound down to $500 almost immediately and eventually down to about $100 per pound.

-=-=-=-=-=-=- MagLev Launch System -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-


73146, A little bit more information about magnetic space launch
Posted by txlibdem on Tue Nov-16-10 11:15 PM
The navy is probably going all magnetic rail guns on their warships. In 2008, the Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Gary Roughead witnessed firsthand a successful and world-record test firing of an electromagnetic rail gun at Naval Surface Warfare Center, Dahlgren.


So our ships can sit over 100 miles away from shore or more and pound almost any enemy fortification or army no matter where they are. Now that's power projection.

Why is the Navy thinking about magnetic rail guns? What's wrong with the old tried and true?


It has now been shown that magnetic launch systems are possible, not just some wacky science fiction dream. The small units that can fit aboard a Navy ship can get a projectile to 2500 meters per second (m/s), escape velocity is 11,200 m/s so we're almost a quarter there with a small unit. The only thing required is to increase the size and power. The last link gave a power requirement of 30 mega watts for the 2500 m/s system. The required amount of power will be quite a bit more than that but we should be able to power it with solar, a fairly large sized wind farm, or a coal or nuclear power plant.

Here is more about the maglev launch system:


At $50 per kg you could launch yourself (or something equally heavy) for less than $5,000 instead of a couple of million. This is a breakthrough technology, there is no doubt.



-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- End of copy and paste -=-=-=-=-=--=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

A recent article described a space launch system that uses a MagLev launcher to boost a scramjet (like the X-34) to Mach 5 then the X-34 engines kick in until it hits Mach 10, then they space capsule disconnects from the scramjet and its rockets kick in to bring the vehicle the rest of the way to orbit.

Could they be thinking along those lines? After all, the Navy is planning to switch its ship-board guns to MagLev (rail guns) because of their power and rapid firing (Kinetic weapons fired from 200 miles away instead of 20 miles).

First of all you are conflating multiple technologies. Maglev and rail are two very, very different things.

Maglev is a contactless system that levitates an object over a magnetic rail system and use clever timing of changing magnetic fields to drag or push the payload along the rails. Aerodynamic consideration will always keep speeds for such a system subsonic. A variation which does not support the payload magnetically, but simply adds impetus to that payload in free flight as it passes through a series of magnetic rings will work at supersonic speeds, but is a mega-engineering nightmare. It involves aligning those rings over a distands of several tens of kilometres along a precise balistic curve and bracing them against all the forces involed including supersonic shockwaves at a distance measured in metres or less.


Railguns are conceptually far simpler. Two conductive rails with a movable carriage making an electrical short circut between them. By applying the electrical input at the muzzle and starting the short at the other end of the rails at the breech a magnetic field is set up which accelerates the carriage along the rails. "The short 'wants' to be shorter." is as succinct as was as any to put it. When the carriage reaches the muzzle inertia carries it past the conductors, the electrical short is broken and the payload and carriage fly free.

The biggest downside to railguns is that the currents involved run into millions of amperes, which causes big sparks and massive errosion of the rails, necessitating replacement after at most a handful of shots, and polishing/refurbishing after every shot.

Another downside is the enormous acceleration. Railguns will never be used to fire live or otherwise fragile cargo.

Without looking, what you appear to be talking about would be: Maglev catapault to about mach 0.6 - 0.7, launching a ramjet only mothership which takes things to mach 5 or so where the orbital module's SCRAMjet takes over to mach 10 then a final rocket stage to finish.

Navy Railguns could work on a smaller body than Earth (Mars being about the upper limit) to launch pellets of ore directly into orbit. On the Earth's surface their major utility will be in weapon systems if the errosion issues can be addressed. Right now you are reading a wishlist, not a deployment plan.

I'm not sure but it seems like you are confused about the Navy's implementation plans and NASA's plans to mate a MagLev to a Scramjet to inexpensively launch payloads into orbit. I ask you to go back and actually read the links; there is some good info there.

Your comment about the "high amperage", "sparks" and "enormous acceleration" makes me think you believe that there is a single huge discharge of current that would push the payload/sled off and away. Nothing could be farther from the truth. The NASA proposal uses Linear Induction Motors all along a 2 mile long track (yeah, I also called it a rail, but you also use the terms interchangeably so...). The track itself magnetically pushes the vehicle along every inch of the way so it's a smooth acceleration curve. The linked article said the force will never exceed 3G's which is tolerated by a healthy person easily so your comment about acceleration being "enourmous" is just plain wrong.

The Navy plans to replace the canon on all their ships with MagLev guns that will launch a 35 ton bomb up to 200 miles. They also have plans to replace the steam powered fighter launch systems with a MagLev system as well. The US Navy is not going to switch their fleet weapons and fighter launch systems to a technology that will burn itself out after "at most a handful of shots" as you claim. To quote a former President, "not gonna happen."

The links had such great info, it's too bad you didn't get a chance to read them.

"The Navy plans to replace the canon on all their ships with MagLev guns that will launch a 35 ton bomb up to 200 miles."

How do you think they plan on putting a 2 mile long track in a gun barrel? (BTW 2 miles @ 3G accelleration = a final velocity of about 400 m/s or just supersonic. (d = ut + 1/2at^2 and v = u + at are the equations you need. (u = 0 and can be ignored))) A maglev (magnetic levitation) carriage which relies on gravity to keep in "contact" with the tracks will almost certainly part company at mach speeds. A linear ring induction motor can go beyond mach 1, but has to be built to withstand a sonic boom at essentially zero metres. The two miles and 3 Gs you quote, make it very clear that the intent is for a subsonic launch when you factor in air resistance and safety margins.

Mach 7.5 from a gun barrel makes it equally clear that THAT SYSTEM IS A RAILGUN, as in 2 fixed rails and a moving short circuit. AND they DO spark and, unless something has radically changed in the last few months, they wear out very, very quickly. After a single shot at the highest power setting IIRC.

Accelerations MUST be several times those experienced by artillery shells in conventional guns, physics won't allow for anything else. To get it down to the size of a ship's gun we're looking at about 1500 Gs of acceleration to achieve a 2500 m/s muzzle velocity. BTW, just for funsies, 1500 Gs times 35 tons of projectile mass equals over 50 thousand tons of recoil.



Simply knowing something about the numbers you quote at me, make it quite clear that you ARE confusing two very different (albeit related) technologies. AND you are confusing, just barely feasible proofs of concept with something ready for field trials.


"They also have plans to replace the steam powered fighter launch systems with a MagLev system as well.

This I see as feasible, but I have to ask why? Except I know the answer. The American military are notorious for finding and implementing complex (and expensive) solutions to non-existent problems.

"The US Navy is not going to switch their fleet weapons and fighter launch systems to a technology that will burn itself out after "at most a handful of shots" as you claim. To quote a former President, "not gonna happen." "

That is NOT a bet I would care to make. US military wastefulness is legendary. Your main battle tank divisions are almost completely worthless against an enemy with an intact air force or even a significant guerila presence behind the battlefront. The attached artillery is even more vulnerable. For a while there a heavy dew was enough to disolve stealth coatings on aircraft. Australian and Chinese submarines routinely "destroy" US carrier fleets and a good part of the reason is an over-reliance on technology.

Some MIC salesdroid will have the charts to show that with such a powerful weapon system, deployed at such a distance, wear and tear (and barrel/rail changeout times) won't be an issue.

I wonder what charts they have to show that the very significant electromagnetic signatures of these systems (railguns particularly) won't be broadcasting exact locations to the enemy?

How do you get recoil from a continuous, smooth acceleration curve? You are confusing a standard canon again. In a standard cannon a shell contains both the projectile and a quantity of explosive to accelerate the projectile towards the target. The explosion of the powder in the shell causes a single acceleration event and results in recoil. For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction: recoil in this case.

In the MagLev gun the entire length of the gun is used in accelerating the projectile to the desired velocity. There is no recoil because the force applied per microsecond is not that great, not an explosive force. The entire ship might move slightly as a result of each firing of the gun but if you've ever seen WWII footage that happens with any warship.

Your critique seems to involve a lot of information denigrating the US Military. I don't care to respond to that issue because it is irrelevant to the discussion of whether we have the technology to colonize space, not whether the American Military Industrial Complex is a huge ripoff or not. PS, aaaaaaa-yup.

As for the "just barely feasible proofs of concept" comment, I presume you are veering off topic again and bashing the US Navy's plans. That must surely be it because the linear induction motors that will power the MagLev part of the space launch system are in place today and working quite well, one track in Minnesota and another in Upsala, Switzerland. The system is run constantly and is used to fine tune the software for those two companies' proposed Personal Rapid Transit systems. Try a google search for Linear Induction Motor, perhaps?

Congratulations, you have just managed to demonstrate that you have zero understanding of the laws of motion. 1500 times the force of gravity, applied to 35 tons is an instantaneoulsly applied force in excess of 50000 tons and that my fine friend, in the gun world, is called "a kick like a Missouri mule."

Nothing directly against the military in this argument, except to point out the tendency to let the coolness of the toy override its practicality.

No, I mean just barely feasible as in it is still far closer to experimental physics, than weapons development. Developmentally, the strategic and tactical airborne LASERs are more advanced.


And yet again you conflate two separate systems. I am fully aware of the existence of working maglev systems, and the best of them today just barely manage to nudge mach 0.5 in atmosphere, and every article a quick google turned up on the idea of supersonic maglev spoke of doing it in a vacuum which kinda makes the whole sonic (super or otherwise) thing moot.

Magnetic LEVITATION has it's physical limitation and a solid wall of sound is one of them. A BALISTIC linear induction motor in which the moving part is magnetically "thrown" through the air from one element to the next could do supersonic given enough reinforcement, but I don't see it catching on. 1) the trip would feel like being constantly rear ended, and 2) the potential for disaster would be too great, there are no/zero/nada/zip graceful failure modes.


Three times now you have mashed together the features and capabilities of two very different technologies confidently assigning to the more mature of the two (maglev) capabilities of the other that test a number of physical limits and ARE ABSOLUTLEY IMPOSSIBLE TO ACHIEVE WITH MAGLEV TECHNOLOGY.

I have no problem with either technology. My problem lies solely with your repeated misrepresentation of them.

If I hit you with a baseball bat you could die. If I put you in a wagon and push you along, steadily increasing speed, do you get a broken bone or serious injury from that? Aaaaaa-nope! Could it cause your death? Aaaaaa-nope! Again you show that you have no, zero, zip, nada understanding of this topic.

A single explosive force causes recoil. A small but steady push on a MagLev sled does not. The forces will be minute when measured microsecond by microsecond comparatively. Your claim that the ultimate speed the MagLev sled achieves has anything to do with recoil is laughable and shows your understanding is stuck in the 1900s somewhere. Get with the 21st Century, friend.

"The Navy plans to replace the canon on all their ships with MagLev guns that will launch a 35 ton bomb up to 200 miles".

What you have done is conflate 2 different systems. The first one, the Navy one on a ship (the railgun), is, from your link:

"The 5-inch/54and 5-inch/62guns of today achieve muzzle velocities of approximately 800 m/s. In contrast, a railgun can accelerate a projectile to hypersonic velocities of 2500 m/s or Mach 7 and greater, enabling more that 200 nautical mile ranges within a six-minute time of flight. "

The only mention of 'tons' there is the weight of the gun - 40 tons. The 2 mentions of projectile weight are 2.4kg and 15kg. The navy.mil link doesn't mention any weights at all. Neither link about the Navy mentions magnetic levitation at all.

The other 3 links are about magnetic levitation, but have nothing to do with the Navy. They are about ground rail systems, that are kilometres long. They are the ones with a 35 ton payload.

Your idea of accelerating 35 tons up to 2500 m/s within the length of a ship (maybe shorter, if you want it to be aimable separately from the direction of the ship, ie in a moveable gun) would indeed involve very high accelerations and forces that a ship could never withstand. The acceleration of the railgun projectile, if constant along the barrel, is given by

v * v = 2 * a * s

where v in the muzzle velocity, a the acceleration, and s the length of the barrel. Say it's a 10 metre barrel; then a = (v * v) / (2 * 10) = 312500 m/s/s, or over 31000g (TheMadMonk was being generous calling it 1500g; perhaps he allowed for the entire length of the ship - you'd need over 200 metres to keep the acceleration that low). Now, it's feasible using that kind of acceleration for a 15kg projectile, but not a 35 ton one - which is why the Navy is not thinking about a railgun projectile that big on a ship in its wildest dreams. Say the ship weighs 100,000 tons - the biggest warship ever made, roughly. The force to accelerate 35 tons at 31000g would have a reaction to accelerate 100,000 tons in the opposite direction at

35 * 31000 / 100000 = 11g, roughly. It's more than ten times the weight of the entire ship. This is the recoil

I repeat: you are confusing 2 completely separate technologies here. One, which the Navy wants to use, takes place on a ship, and uses projectiles wieghed in kilograms, not tons. The other, for launching things into space, uses miles of track (and, in some cases, an evacuated tube) and magnetic levitation and involved multi-ton payloads.

Your attempt to proudly display your understanding of a simple equation that you saw in a book somewhere is laudable. But your attempt to confuse the issue with irrelevant claims and false assertions is laughable.

Say it all you like but magnetic forces exerted on an object that is not physically connected to anything at any point or at any time does not create recoil.

The space launch MagLev system would, indeed, be kilometers long so your argument fails at its face. Your calculations are misused and do not apply. Sorry, you seem smart and I'm sure you wanted to display that. You failed.

Of course magnetic forces include a reaction. Every force in the universe has a reaction. Gravity, electromagnetic forces (which include the forces between objects in contact), weak and strong nuclear forces. All of them. If one magnet repels another, with no contact, then it is subject to an equal and opposite force in the other direction.

If the railgun produces a force on the projectile (which is, by the way, in contact with the rail - that's the whole point, it has to complete the circuit), then there is an equal and opposite force on the railgun.

I know, let's ask the military:



The navy railgun project has nothing to do with magnetic levitation. Go back and read your own links. And then, please, go back to the physics you should have learnt at about age 14, and get your basic understanding right. My use of the equation is highly relevant; if you want to know the acceleration involved, given the final velocity and the distance, then that's what you use.

My first impression is that a 20 ton vehicle could not be much bigger than a tank and therefore, a very short rail gun, and per my equation of force recoil would indeed be a vastly larger recoil force than a Navy ship like a battleship or an aircraft carrier. I was not considering the possibility of EMRG's on a tank or a littoral assault craft (small, maneuverable, light attack vessel). My grasp of the breadth of the Military's plans or history with EMRG's was limited to large Navy ships, 100s of tons if not more when you include ballast.

But I agree with you (see my previous post) that criticism and/or discussion of the Navy rail gun has no bearing on the OP's focus which is a MagLev space launch system that is kilometers long. To further constructive discussion of the actual OP, I agree to drop the topic of the Navy rail gun. There, we're being all civil-like. They said it couldn't be done...

The article states that the entire length of the track is used in calculating the recoil. Lengthening the track (or rail) would then decrease the recoil force by the equations included therein. But then it also states that the entire recoil force is felt at the breech of the EMRG. This causes in my mind a contradiction. And the link does, as I surmised, pertain only to tanks and Howitzers so their calculations of huge G forces would not pertain in this discussion.

I found particularly interesting the comment about soldiers firing the standard M551 Sheridan with regular rounds often suffer black eyes from the recoil shock they are exposed to. I have even more respect for our young men and women fighting the two wars for oil we are still engaged in. The second war looks like it has also just switched to a war for mining rights as well as oil. Hooray! But I respect our soldiers more, their commanders (including the CIC) far less.

But far from putting the final nail in the coffin of EMRG's as a viable weapon for Navy ships, (or tanks/Howitzers) the section on recoil mitigation showed that even with a vehicle the size of a tank or Howitzer electromagnetic guns are, indeed, possible and recoil can be mitigated without excessive G forces on the vehicle and its occupants.

But since we are dropping the sidetrack of EMRG's and Howitzers and even pop-guns I'll make that the last I'll say on the topic.

No-one has been talking about the reaction or recoil of the space launch maglev system. So, no, my argument does not fall flat on its face. You claimed the Navy wants to launch 35 ton projectiles from their ships. So I did a calculation for the Navy launching something.

Please, just go back and read your own posts. You seem unaware of what is in them, even when they've been quoted back to you.

What you need to do is leave the Navy, and railguns, out of this entirely. They were a red herring that you introduced. If you want to talk about the launch system (which is what is relevant to the spaceplane discussion), then just talk about MagLev stuff.

If a projectile beginning at rest is moving at a speed of 7500 KPH after travelling the length of a ship's gun barrel (let's say 60 feet) then the projectile will be spending less than 1/60th of a second in the barrel. But for that 60th of a second the projectile will (and must) experience a motive force of 50000 plus tons. And the gun and whatever the gun is attatched to WILL EXPERIENCE AND EQUAL AND OPPOSITE REACTION. (Plus more forces trying to push the rails appart.) For a very big ship this is still going to be a 1 G jolt and move the ship 10 cm (4 inches) or more, at the speed of an olympic sprinter, beneath feet and anything else not tied down.

And since you have now repeated the same "false equivalencies" and "bait and switch" argumentative tactics for the fourth time running, you also rank with teabaggers, creationists, climate change deniers and a whole host of other unsavoury characters in my books. Oh and taking two completely separate arguments of mine and mashing them togething in a nonsensical way to try and make me look like an idiot only adds to your basic dishonesty.

You would do well to get your understanding of basic physics at least into the 18th.

Shame really, since we are actually on the same side in the greater argument. I simply started out to correct some missconceptions, but it appears that you are so in love with what you believe to be the implications of those missconceptions that you refuse to accept physical reality.


Railgun: Compact, conceptually simple, extreme acceleration, extreme lateral and recoil forces, hypersonic speeds. Extremely high wear. Still very experimental.
Maglev: Large, low acceleration, moderate terrestrial speeds in atmosphere. Virtually no wear apart from weathering effects. Rapidly maturing technology.

Those are the feature lists. Notice how there is no overlap. Your repeated attempts to claim features of one technology for the other says a hell of a lot about you, but doesn't make your argument any less of a lie.

Your attempt to proudly display your understanding of a simple equation that you saw in a book somewhere is laudable. But your attempt to confuse the issue with irrelevant claims and false assertions is laughable.

Say it all you like but magnetic forces exerted on an object that is not physically connected to anything at any point or at any time does not create recoil.

Get two strong bar magnets.

Suspend one lengthwise from a string.

Now, hold the other magnet with your fingers and slowly bring it close to the suspended magnet such that the suspended magnet is repelled and swings away from your hand.

You should feel your hand being pushed away from the suspended magnet. The closer you move your magnet to the suspended magnet, the stronger the "push" you'll feel.

Now try bringing the magnet in your hand close to the suspended magnet really fast. The quicker you bring your magnet close to the suspended magnet the larger the repellent force you'll feel too.

This is the same as the recoil force a rail gun would experience, except multiplied tens of thousands of times and condensed to a fraction of a second. The bigger the force imparted, and the shorter the time it's imparted over, the bigger the recoil force. It doesn't matter if this force comes from explosives, magnetic fields or photons.

No matter how you cut it, Newton's 3rd law is unavoidable. F_AB = -F_BA

I've tried to explain to you that the recoil is divided into millions of parts per second. That is the force that will be felt, no more. It does not multiply itself, nor is it additive. Recoil of a black powder canon or a shotgun is a one-time event and thus the equations you cite are applicable in that instance. The recoil from a million tiny nudges to a MagLev vehicle is comparatively inconsequential. There is no additive force at work here. There is no logic to your insistence to connect the two topics. So take your recoil figure and divide by 1 million.

I'll do the math for you: 11Gs divided by 1 million is 0.000011 G --inconsequential in the larger scheme of things.

And remember the main topic of the OP is a MagLev space launch system that is similar in concept only to the Navy's planned EMRG. The space launch MagLev track would indeed be kilometers long so your arguments against the Navy electromagnetic rail gun have no bearing on the discussion central to this OP. I've done you a disservice to allow the discussion to get sidetracked over the Navy guns. They were only mentioned to show that MagLev technology is being looked at as a serious option for many different applications: transportation, the military, and space launches.

Of course, I just pulled the 1 million figure out of my hind quarters, the actual figure may be 10 million or 500,000 but either way you slice it the forces at work on a microsecond-by-microsecond basis are very small.

Read again the metaphor about giving you a one-time super acceleration event to your back (perhaps with a baseball bat). You would be severely injured, there is no doubt, and you wold be moved forward a bit because of the equations you so graciously provided in previous posts. The farther I want to move you, the greater the force with which I must strike you. This is a canon. This is a shotgun. This is a potato launcher (or pumpkin launcher for those that think big). This is described by your equations.

Now imagine that instead of that violent one-time event I placed you on a magnetically levitated wagon (remember, no friction) and began to gently push you along, increasing my speed slowly but surely microsecond by microsecond in a smooth acceleration curve. Ultimately your speed would be the maximum I could deliver but my hand would not suffer a deadly recoil when I let go of you. You would just continue on in a straight line at the final speed I brought you to. The only force I felt an any time during the acceleration is the force of each step along the way and that was easily absorbed by the elasticity of my muscles and ligaments. I would not die. You would not be injured but your speed would be very fast by the time I stopped pushing you forward.

but it looks like at least part of this latest reply from you is directed at me, so I'm going to reply to it all.

"the main topic of the OP is a MagLev space launch system". No. The OP is about the X-34. Nothing to do with any Maglev launch system at all. You replied to the OP with a post in which you falsely conflated a Navy magnetic railgun with other people's concepts of MagLev launch systems. The navy railgun is not 'MagLev'; it is a railgun, with no levitation involved at all.

You then further muddied the waters by making up the following claim: "The Navy plans to replace the canon on all their ships with MagLev guns that will launch a 35 ton bomb up to 200 miles". This bears no relations to reality whatsoever. You took parts from 2 separate articles, incorrectly tied them together, and then complained when others have used some simple physics to show why your claim is ludicrous. You have shown complete ignorance of Newton's 3rd law, by claiming that the acceleration of 35 tons to 2500m/s on a ship would have no recoil, and then tried to weasel out of this by claiming that the Navy is contemplating using a tunnel many kilometres long - you have magically relocated this off of a ship and onto land.

You now show you have no concept of acceleration or force. You cannot "divide an acceleration by a million", say the result is still an acceleration, and say you've shown anything. Acceleration is measured in metres per second per second (or feet per second per second, etc.), and force is mass times acceleration. Dividing an acceleration, or a force, by a number of a million, or anything else, does not give you any meaningful number. The acceleration, and the force, apply for as long as the projectile is in the gun. "The recoil is divided into millions of parts per second" is a completely meaningless phrase.

Your fundamental problem is that you introduced the topic of the railgun, when it is completely irrelevant to the topic of space launches. We just need to persuade you to drop the topic of the railgun, and any figures from it, because they have nothing whatsoever to do with space launches. Our figures show how your claims of the Navy launching 35 tons 200 miles from a ship are ridiculous. The articles about the Navy are nothing to to with any MagLev system at all. We have never said that the reaction forces for a MagLev space launch system are huge.

TheMadMonk wrote knowledgeably about MagLev systems, and you continued to try to tie in phrases and figures about the Navy railgun with claims about MagLev, when the 2 are completely different.

Would you like us to rewrite your contributions to this thread so that they make some sense? There is, at the bottom of your posts, a worthwhile contribution, if you'll stop bringing in the Navy, and just talk about a Maglev system.

So we're agreed then. I'll drop the Navy rail gun (EMRG) topic. I'll just point out that your link proved either helpful in supporting my argument or pointing out that recoil mitigation is possible even on a vehicle as small as a Howitzer or a tank. There is a contradiction in the article that is beyond my present math ability to resolve: I do not see how the recoil force can be both felt at every magnetic armature along the rail yet also be felt 100% at the breech. So that was my last statement on weaponry. Done and done.

As to the math, the link that you provided states clearly that the length of the track (or rail) does, indeed, need to be included in the calculations of the recoil force. So, for application to a MagLev space launch system, the correct calculations show that a track several kilometers long will not suffer significant force loading from accelerating a multi-ton space vehicle to escape velocity. NASA's MagLev space launch plans call for a 2 mile long straight track, 2 miles being approximately 3.2 kilometers.

So, those calculations show that such a space launch is doable. The electricity for such a launch would cost $47 (it's in one of my links in my first post here). There could be 6 to 12 launches per day, launching a over 100,000 tons of payload into orbit per year.

...to be had from the reactionless drive you claim to have knowledge of.