publiusr - 18/2/2007 1:50 PMI think Leik Myrabo was to do a book for Apogee on the subject--but he has taken forever.It would probably take a nuclear reactor and a laser both in a building a mile on a side to place a Vostok mass craft up there--and it would be molten by the time it reached orbit.I wish people would forget all this talk about doing away with rockets--embrace them--and increase their size and capability over time as we have done with all other forms of transportation.
publiusr - 17/2/2007 10:50 PMIt would probably take a nuclear reactor and a laser both in a building a mile on a side to place a Vostok mass craft up there
--and it would be molten by the time it reached orbit.
Tom Ligon - 17/2/2007 6:27 PMThe array of lasers to do this for practical spacecraft would be awesome, and very expensive. It would probably be an effective launch system, but the economics would be daunting. At some scale it probaby is practical, but the up-front costs are going to make folks choke and squirm until a payback is in sight. But that's a general trend in everything worthwhile, isn't it?
Full-fledged laser launch system - yes, building it is expensive. I am saying that maybe trying something simpler first is much cheaper - basically, it's little more than bringing THEL to Delta IV launch and firing it precisely into the nozzle from the back while Delta IV is ascending. If THEL can hit a flying mortar round, it shouldn't need any further improvement in accuracy of targeting machinery or beam width to track RS-68's nozzle?
stargazer777 - 18/2/2007 11:31 AMIf THEL can hit a flying mortar round, it shouldn't need any further improvement in accuracy of targeting machinery or beam width to track RS-68's nozzle?I understand that there is continuing research on this topic. However, tracking a missile (or whatever you want to call it) and maintaining constant contact by laser through the atmosphere may be more difficult than you imagine. Remember it doesn't take much cloud cover to completely disperse a laser.
If THEL can hit a flying mortar round, it shouldn't need any further improvement in accuracy of targeting machinery or beam width to track RS-68's nozzle?
vda - 19/2/2007 6:00 AMThank NASA for placing space launch complex on Cape Canaveral. Wet swampy terrain near the ocean. Not just wet, but wet with sea salts! Oh yeah, just about right to spend billions of $s on corrosion protection for vehicles and buildings. You cannot even properly dig flame trenches underground in this swamp, need to build huge ramps instead, which in turn lead to "cannot use rail tracks for transportation, ramps are too steep for trains", and now suddenly you can't have 4-SRB rockets "because crawlers can't support the load". Just wonderful...
stargazer777 - 2/3/2007 4:02 PMWould there be any advantage to having one or more lasers on the rocket itself? Solid state lasers might be light weight enough -- the question would seem to me to be whether you would gain more in thrust than you would lose in additional weight -- of course conventional rocket engines aren't exactly light weight either. You may gain quite a bit if you can bypass complex and heavy machinery of a regular liquid fuel or even solid fuel booster.