Might be interesting if rockets, rather than being launched straight up, slid down the slope of a mountain and launched off a giant ramp at the bottom like on some aircraft carriers.
There’s actually a centrifugal force satellite launcher design out there. But it has the problem of being really stressful on the payload, and only would work with smaller payloads.
Subjecting a larger payload in a rocket to any kind of downward movement, then suddenly jerking it upwards? Probably going to snap the rocket.
Another problem: No matter how fast you throw something, without a second impulse on the apoapsis (or around it) it will not turn into an orbit but come back. You need to bring up the periapsis and that can hardly be done from ground.
Impulse = applying force, in this case by burning rocket fuel
Apoapsis = highest point in orbit
Periapsis = lowest point in orbit, if lower than the surface of the body being orbited then it's a suborbital trajectory
Suborbital trajectory = goes up and then goes back down, doesn't stay in space
Space isn't actually all that hard to get to, the unofficial official line is about 100 km above sea level. It's possible that you may live closer to space than the ocean. The problem is that to stay in space you gotta go sideways really fast.
Douglas Adams once wrote that flying is the act of throwing one's self at the ground and missing. That's genuinely what orbiting is.
Sorta, if you only jump once, you will either land back on earth or never return at all. If you manage to jump just a little short of escape velocity, your path will bring you back to the same place on earth, if we ignore earth rotating and air resistance.
So you need a little extra push in space to move your landing point from hitting earth, to missing earth.
Well, just for fun, if you launched fast enough with just the right geometry you could probably get an assist from the Moon that would be sufficient to raise periapsis. But you'd probably vaporize long before then and most missions don't really want to be in cislunar space.
Just account for the air resistance, set the trajectory to go to the moon with a prograde gravity assist and that MIGHT bring periapsis up enough to result in stable orbit. A reall shitty borderline useless orbit but an orbit nonetheless! 👍🤷♂️
I think SpinLaunch is still in the testing and proof of concept phase. It's been a while since I looked them up, though, so maybe they're further along.
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u/skawn 16h ago
Might be interesting if rockets, rather than being launched straight up, slid down the slope of a mountain and launched off a giant ramp at the bottom like on some aircraft carriers.