Ambassador Mollari: "Mass Drivers? They have been outlawed by every civilized planet!" Lord Refa: "These are uncivilized times." Ambassador Mollari: "We have treaties!" Lord Refa: "Ink on a page!" Babylon 5.
@@isaacarthurSFIA Its funny you say that, I was actually surprised at how well the CGI held up. All the more impressive when you consider that it was done what were basically Commodore Amiga gaming computers, and not the fancy custom stuff most other CGI was rendered on at the time.
@@jeechun also, the only reason you really want an orbital ring for earth or Mars is the atmosphere. You aren't in orbit, you are just high enough up to avoid atmosphere. So there is no real reason to build one for the moon, a mass driver on the surface is just as effective and likely much easier. For Mars idk. But I'd like space elevator somewhere, and if it doesn't work on Mars, with its fast spin and low gravity, it works no where.
@@neolithictransitrevolution427 Right, on Moon there is not that much need for an orbital ring. High structures can be built there easily (if the terrain would cause some troubles, when building a mass driver oin the surface). Orbital rings could be also handy, to help capturing interplanetary traffic, and allowing them to be built only for in space conditions. No need to use them in atmosphere any more.
I still think for earth sized planets that skyhooks are the more promising tech in the short term. Mass drivers are far more useful for lower mass planets and moons with slower orbital speeds
I think the order goes expendable rockets, then reusable rockets, then skyhooks, and finally an orbital ring. I don't think any other options or order will make financial sense for launching from Earth. From other objects though, I expect mass drivers or centrifugal launchers to see a lot more use.
@@faroncobb6040 excellent way to put it. I also think we’ll end up using mass drivers on a booster to launch cargo such as semi processed ore from no/low grav areas like the belt. It’s always going to be a mix of solutions and I’m very excited to live in this era of space travel!
@@faroncobb6040 COnsidering what I have seen from the one company that is currently researching centrifugal launchers, I am unconvinced that will be viable in the forseeable future. As an artillery piece, maybe. but not as a space launch option. We are going to have space fountains before that. And once you have those, rockets become obsolete and you can built your first Ring.
SRB test videos always bring back fun memories. I've witnessed two in person. My hometown was basically a bedroom community for Thiokol employees. I met a lot of important people when I was a kid, including Bob Ebeling.
Happy Arthursday! If you're currently strapped to a rocket or mass-driver while listening, may your acceleration be smooth and your trajectory not intersect the ground.
During this times, most people I interact have a nihilistic worldview and don't really care about preserving humanity, it is a breath of fresh air to see projects to get us closer to avoiding mass extinctions.
There is no danger of a mass extinction and considering how economies all over the world are still growing, I would say your claim of widespread nihilism is also false. . What are you talking about?
First commenter is probably less than 20 and still in school where that mindset is most prevalent. If you are outside of that age range or in a cultural bubble that may be why the mindset seems strange to you
Earth will be fine. It's gone through many extinction events and is still going Life will be fine. Life always uh uh finds a way Humans won't go extinct. Were too adaptable. Human civilization might fail in this version. The maybe in a thousand years, the next version of civilization will have better luck
Is a mass-driver rocket hybrid option feasible during the prototyping stage? A shorter mass driver would initially accelerate a smaller rocket, and at the end of the mass driver, the rocket would ignite and go about its way.
Would love to know how much less fuel a rocket (e.g falcon 9) would require if its initial velocity is 200km/h as opposed to 0km/h. Is anyone willing to do the calculations?
hah! that's exactly what I was thinking. we already use catapults on carrier aircraft, seems like it would make sense to do something similar for rockets.
Additionally, if you are trying to achieve a carbon neutral rocket, it seems to me that hydrolox and mass drivers would compliment each other quite well.
The video hints at it towards the end: would it be sensible to combine rocket and mass driver in one system? As in, having mass driver just a few hundred meters long, providing some initial acceleration to a rocket - a 500m mass driver should be able to accelerate to roughly 1000 km/h at 5g. Of course, the fuel and cost savings would not be that massive but the intial investment needed to build such a driver woulld also be comparatively low. And to me it seems like this could be implemented without too much further technological advancements needed?
Yes, and it will come up a bit more as a tandem option in our skyhooks rotovators episode in a couple months and later launch loops one, but I didn't want to extend this episode any longer
🎯 Key points for quick navigation: [03:37] 🚀 Mass drivers use Earth's mass for thrust. [04:34] ⏳ Mass drivers offer faster launches. [05:01] 🚀 Mass drivers can launch cargo at high accelerations. [06:51] 🚀 Rockets expel propellant for thrust. [07:17] 🔥 Hotter exhaust increases rocket speed. [11:04] 🚀 Rockets require exponentially more fuel for higher speeds. [15:03] 👶 Mass drivers are newer technology. [15:57] 💸 Mass drivers have lower launch costs. [17:16] ♻️ Mass drivers can be powered by renewable energy. [18:09] 🛡️ Mass drivers are safer. [19:32] ⚡ Efficient energy conversion is crucial for mass drivers. [21:51] 💡 Variable Pitch Screw Launchers are more cost-effective. [24:02] 🏗️ Variable Pitch Launchers use cheaper materials. [25:21] 📈 Variable Pitch Launchers have a cost advantage at higher speeds. [27:07] 💰 Mass drivers are cheaper for high-speed missions. [28:00] 🚀 Rockets are expensive for high-speed missions. [28:28] Overcoming atmospheric drag is a challenge for mass drivers. [29:25] Variable Pitch Launchers use evacuated tubes. [33:47] 💸 Rockets have lower upfront costs. [34:43] 🚀 Rockets are adaptable. [35:12] ♻️ Rockets are becoming safer. [36:05] ⏳ Mass drivers are a promising future solution.
Great work overall, but your last comment is wrong. Rockets are not so infrequent now that they have negligible environmental cost. On the contrary, we've been launching a lot of satellites, and the current use of rocket fuel in the upper atmosphere has significantly worsened the ozone layer, to the point that both poles have widening holes and we get more cosmic radiation exposure. We cannot let that keep going at the current pace, thus need alternatives like mass drivers to be used if we plan to keep expanding our non-earth presence. Given our growing demand for energy and satellites, getting these more expensive upfront programs working sooner than later is appropriate. Besides, so long as the economy grows faster than interest rates, deficit spending is a positive use of funds, if MMT is right.
I very much agree. We need to consider the total amount of additional pollution from rockets after factoring in their anticipated growth from now until a more sustainable solution becomes operational.
crazy idea maybe but couldnt you theoretically do like a balloon system? Have a super massive long blimp type balloon thats permanently in the high stratosphere with a several mile long built in tube. It would obviously need to only be for cargo that can withstand high G's but you wouldnt have to deal with but a tiny fraction of the air resistance and pressure. Maybe it could be only a mile or 2 long with this set up. I'd imagine it like a permanent floating factory where cargo is sent up very cheaply from ground level via other balloons which drop their hot air back into the main system and then are dropped back to ground with a reusable parachute. Lots of probably dumb ideas not well thought out, but it makes sense to me
I know plenty of folks have said it already but I’ll say it again: Your voice is an additional flavor to this channel. It wouldn’t be right without it. Don’t ever change unless you desire to as we, your audience, are more than happy with what you give us!
I think we should really push for building a mass driver, not just because it would work to accelerate accessibility to space, it would also create an absolute ton of construction jobs that couldn't currently be taken by AI and would absolutely supercharge the economy.
I'm going comment again for the engagement algorithm but will do the search after the video. I'm almost certain this is where I learned about the Lofstrom Loop and active.... Wait. There they are in video. I'm glad an update is being considered :-D .
Thanks for your optimistic take on humanity. I feel that we, earth citizens, are capable of so much more and we have to keep pushing for that. Cheers from NZ, Wolfe
One idea, going off the bomb kettle fusion power plant model, would be the Orion Spudgun. Have a large kettle of water, a barrel pointed skyward that extends far enough to catch the ejected steam, and a ship with pusher plate/parachute to ride the geyser. Absolutely demented, but buildable under nearly century old science. Would actually be interesting to see in an alien invasion story where we get less than 20 years notice and need to figure out a way to get battleships or missiles into space in a hurry Of course, you could also use the power captured from a bomb kettle plant to run magrails or the like if you don't want to follow in the tradition of one of humanity's first launches into outer space, though theoretically you could always use both
Just came here from Nebula to report a mis-upload, in hopes this gets noticed... Your newest video on nano tech is actually the same "energy of the future" from a few weeks ago. Hopefully it gets fixed soon... Cheers!
Let's say a mass driver tube is straight vertical and located in Mt. Everest: So 0.1-1 ton per meter of the mass driver tube x 70km = 70-700.000 tons that must be suspended in air. But a mass driver won't be straight vertical so it's more likely over 1.000.000 tons suspended in the air (or 100.000 tons if it's made from unobtanium).
You could even avoid needing an evacuated tube using a tethered ring and the variable pitch screw design. Hang the tube from the tether down to the surface with a screw pitch near zero, keeping the plug slow enough to drop a vehicle in front. Then keep the vehicle at a low speed as the tube slopes steeply upward, only accelerating to muzzle velocity once it's above most of the atmosphere. Since the tube is hanging from a ring, make it a full circle and slow the plug back down to return to the station. It would effectively be one of those moving walkways in Caves of Steel, but going from walking speed to orbital speed.
Pausing at three minutes with a random thought. So a "space gun" or even a "verne gun" is basically a extremely high acceleration mass driver with a very short barrel-length track, then?
At~8:30 mark, this is why hydrogen oxygen engines usually mix in a 6:1 ratio instead of the 9:1 for burning all the oxygen. About a third of the H2 is pushed out the back unburned for higher performance
Off topic but I got an email from the National Space Society and I saw that you where the president. As long as I watched your videos I never knew you were in charge of that. Neat!
Re: drones for holding up launch tubes. First, you don't need drones at all. You can mount propellers or other lifting devices directly to the launch tube. The more important question is how much propulsive efficiency are you going to lose towards the end of the launch tube. You're going to want to lift the end up as high as possible to get above as much of the atmosphere as you can. This becomes increasingly more important as your exit velocity goes up. Unfortunately, most atmospheric propulsion methods lose power the higher up you go, so you need more and more lifting devices for each additional unit length of launch tube.
The lift is generated by a prop and an electric motor. With altitude, the prop will get bigger and perhaps more expensive until it starts to resemble an Ingenuity propeller. However, the efficiency with which electricity is converted to torque and then lift may be more constant.
What If the planet Venus left our Solar System and was captured into orbit around either a Red Dwarf (M-Type Star) or Brown Dwarf (L-Type, T-Type or Y-Type)
A really large space based industry with space stations will have a lot of things manufactured in space. I think the future is in spin launch like technology for raw materials to space where space industry uses continuous sunlight for energy for building out space based industry. It can get started on earth, but consider that Spinlaunch's current suborbital spin launch platform already launches with almost enough velocity to escape lunar gravity entirely. Imagine what one could do without an atmosphere on the surface of the moon. And, I think there's good reason to not use a lot of chemical rockets blowing around lunar dust.
Could the tube work in opposite way, with several points along the track pushing large amounts of overpressured gas as the train passes by them and thus the train being pushed outward of the tube?
This video could have been titled _Mass Drivers are Neat!_ We should probably be comparing mass drivers to the mass-produced, extremely reliable, rapidly reusable rockets of 50 years from now.
At some point, I predict we'll use a whole mix of concepts. Hyperloop as a space elevator then launch and catch at the top. Make it long enough and aero dynamics would be null and void. Send any old box into space.
Could you do a video on microplastics? Both as an explainer but also how maybe it could be solved? It seems like a possible fermi paradox filter as well.
The problem with drones is the upper portion where the atmosphere is thin. Can't really do cheap drones high enough where the air is thin enough for the evacuated tube. Active support likely wins out in practice for that.
@@spaceinfrastructure3238 That's still dense enough of an atmosphere where launching a craft out at hypersonic velocities is going to generate a LOT of heat. If that's not a problem then why bother with the evacuated tube. Also flying a drone like that is one thing, flying a drone like that under load is another. Like I guess you could have drone lifting bodies for much of the tube that's in dense enough atmosphere and only have active support for the very end when that's not feasible, but I don't think you can do it with purely drones.
It's kind of funny to me how much space exploration seems like a video game mechanic. It's not accessible until mid to late game, and the technological progression comes in tiers with prohibitive costs. As Isaac eloquently explains, you have to start off with rocketry which has low upfront capital requirements and huge operational costs, limiting you to very low throughput space operations serving low demand. The obvious "upgrades" that exist to reach higher throughput tech tiers have monstrous upfront capital requirements but then have rather low operational costs comparatively. A certain amount of profitable usage must be wringed out of the upgrade to break even and cross over into net profit territory. Rockets are sort of the early bootstrapping tech for space access. It's far from ideal, but if you want satellites and the modern luxuries and economic benefits of having them you sort of grit your teeth and go with it, lol. Just like well-designed game mechanics, you can't really short circuit this progression or cheat your way around it to break the game. Space itself, in all its absurd enormity, seems like those unexplored "fog of war" areas of a massive game world. The devs didn't put all that empty space in the game for us not to be intended to explore that. 😆
The biggest problem with this episode is it's not Mass Drivers vs Rockets, it's Mass Driver technology 1st stage -> Aviation technology 2nd stage -> Rocket technology 3rd stage -> Sky hook technology 4th stage -> Ion drive technology 5th stage.
Shoutout to SpaceX Starship which will bring the cost per kg so low and mass per year so high that it won't make sense to build anything else for a very long time. And it could use carbon neutral fuel too.
A few times during this video the music reminded me of the soundtrack from the Mass Effect series, which makes frequent use of mass drivers. (Perhaps that was intentional?) I couldn't help but think thay was ironic since this sort of project would be massively (heh) easier if we could just get ahold of some of that setting's Element Zero (read: handwavium) to cheat code the equations.
I wonder if we could effectively launch space planes up the side of a tall mountain via low-pressure mass driver, then use rockets / hybrid engines with carbon neutral fuels to get the rest of the way. Could make for a decent intermediate stage until we built up bigger and better options.
Harvesting Space Ice: It occurred to me that we should separate the oxygen from the hydrogen in space. We keep the O2 for human use. Send down the hydrogen for terrestrial Fusion power, and use the waste Helium as a propellant.
I am skeptical of mass drivers being a thing, at least on Earth, per se. I see it as being part of a orbital ring and/or tethered ring system. And even then, I think it is more feasible that people want to do space tethers more than mass drivers though technology used for mass drivers can be applied to tethers-I am imagining this scenario being your hypersonic suborbital-capable aircraft gets hooked or coupled to a sled and then accelerated upwards the tether until it reaches orbital velocity, either matching that of the end station or higher, and you can always decouple at any point up the tether to a lower orbit though this will require you to have your own rockets. Mass drivers can also be used as part of a momentum-transfer tether system up in orbit to accelerate the spacecraft to escape velocity in an interplanetary trajectory. This can be useful even with ultra-high impulse nuclear propulsion systems. If there would mass drivers on the ground, then it would be used not as a purely as a way to get to orbit but being able to accelerate a bigger payload so that rocket thrust is not required to accelerate a spacecraft from a standstill, so basically just a catapult up in the air before firing up the engines. This probably would enable high economic scale SSTO systems, especially when coupled with a tether but I don't have the numbers to back it up, not yet anyway. On a more mundane note, I can see small scale mass drivers being employed at regular airports (I really don't think airplanes using good ol' aerodynamic wings are going away anytime soon and VSTOL is going to still be a niche). For an aircraft, the engines use the most fuel per second accelerating to take-off speeds and also create a lot of noise. This will encounter some engineering, practical, and operation challenges (including safety questions that need to be answered) but a mass driver/electromagnetic catapult that can accelerate an airliner up to take-off speeds would be useful and you don't need it to do it like aircraft carrier launches, either. In this case, pilots just need to set a power output that would keep them climbing (in noise mitigation areas, pilots have a short window of time to throttle back the engines from take-off power to reduce noise). Of course, we haven't discussed the potential military applications of mass drivers. In the Halo expanded universe novels, during the war with the Covenant, humanity's colonies have used mass drivers to launch projectiles from the surface in an effort to fight enemy ships as the UNSC is always outgunned when it comes to space warfare (the UNSC, especially when the Spartans are involved, tend to prevail on ground or surface warfare but they are very outclassed when it comes to spaceships).
I've looked into mass drivers and linear motors specifically. There's patents for various types but patents don't actually require any proof an idea will work. In scientific papers, which _do_ require a prototype or at least a simulation or mathematical model to prove it could work, nobody has built one to go above Mach 1 with magnetic levitation linear motors. The highest speed work was NASA stuff from like 20 years ago, and nobody else appears to be pushing the top speed any further with physical prototypes that I could find. The main issue is "edge effects" because the shoe on the vehicle is much shorter than the stator and so magnetic effects on the ends of that shoe cause lots of power loss at high speed and nobody appears to have tried solving that yet. The NASA paper is "High Velocity Linear Induction Launcher with Exit-Edge Compensation for Testing of Aerospace Components" by Kuznetsov & Marriott, they got to ~180 m/s or mach 0.5.
Why light gas guns haven’t seen any applications outside of R&D, I don’t understand. They’re relatively cheap to operate and give railgun-like velocities without all the infrastructure needed.
we should build a mass driver not to reach orbit, but to reach mach 3 so we can use it for hypersonic experiments and develop a cheap and reliable ram jet.
Yo I've tried searching for the song in your description Brandon Lieu into the storm, but I can't find a working link. The spotify play button was grayed out and the youtube video was private. Can you provide a working link?
Don't know much about physics, but am i correct in assuming that mass drivers more or less rely on the same physics principles as for example Ion thrusters, wherein they need a supply of small but constant energy to accelerate the vehicle, by means of low to zero friction, just adding to the momentum and kinetic energy of it
Say mass driver and most picture a linear electromagnetic motor. My question is mass drive so limited as to exclude rotary motors as in a spin launch like platform?
@spaceinfrastructure3238 I think it has great potential for launching raw materials for processing in a space based industry. Take water. Send buckets of it to space. Use solar PV to turn it into rocket fuel. Then fuel or refuel rockets in space allowing one to ground launch traditional rockets with more payload or less fuel. Several spinlaunched orbital accelerator might even be repurposed as booster rockets that can be attached in orbit to a heavy rocket that needs to get to higher orbit. Space stations in orbits that aren't shaded by earth or the moon can benefit from continuous energy from the sun for processing raw materials from the earth and moon. Consider the current SpinLaunch suborbital launch platform already launches with a velocity close to a lunar escape velocity, and the potential implications this has for a future space based industry.
A couple writing glitches in this one. The segment on the significance of different rocket fuels' relative masses and exhaust velocities is good, but at the end you go on a weird tangent comparing them to absolute quantities like LEO velocity or the time it would take to reach Alpha Centauri(?!), as if a rocket had a "top speed" at its exhaust velocity. Of course in reality we routinely reach orbit and beyond despite no chemical rocket's exhaust velocity being nearly that fast. Going faster than their exhaust is one of the two biggest tricks rockets do. The part about transport jets' fuselages being able to handle negative pressure starts out just plain wrong. "Overpressure" is a reference to excessive positive gauge pressure, not negative gauge pressure. The clause and tolerance you speak of and highlight on the screen are referring to the fuselage withstanding positive pressure loads a bit beyond what the pressure relief valve can be set to. The page onscreen starts right out saying that it's talking about positive pressures that start at zero. You do then recover to the unrelated spec that fuselages need to withstand 1psi negative gauge pressure.
The use of the term "overpressure" to describe "negative pressure" was technically incorrect and aeronautical engineers need to be precise. But in SciFi, I can imagine Scotty screaming, as the Enterprise sinks into a gas giant, "Captain, she canna handle the overpressure!!"
Isaac, you uploaded the wrong video on nebula today. You uploaded the "Upcoming Energy Technologies" video again, but you named it "Nanotechnology: the future of everything".
I'm curious. In water, it's possible to pump air in front of a vehicle to speed it up, by reducing the pressure in front of it. Is it possible to do anything similar in atmosphere? Could you, say, pump hydrogen, or some other gas, in front of a moving vehicle, to reduce its atmospheric drag, without putting it in complete vacuum? If so, I would think it might be worth doing on a mass driver, since having a massively long vacuum chamber seems prohibitive.
No where, the best place would be in orbit on an Orbital ring. But failing that, a launch loop between Mauritius and Australia over the Indian ocean is probably best. Equatorial and out of the way.
Many engineers and physicists agree that the best place for a ground-based mass driver is close to the equator and at a high altitude. Launching near the equator provides a “rotational boost” because the Earth’s surface moves fastest there, giving the payload extra initial velocity. High-altitude sites reduce the amount of dense atmosphere the payload must travel through, which cuts down on drag and energy requirements. Potential locations include the Andes Mountains in Ecuador and Mount Kenya in Africa-both high-elevation areas near the equator. You'd probably want to build the mass driver along a mountain slope, taking advantage of the natural elevation so that fewer materials are needed for structural support and foundations.
@@Yoel_Mizrachilol I was going to say the same, just because my backyard can't possibly accomodate it, (and theelectricity bills would be off the roof)
We could do a crowdfunded mission to titan lakes and use falcon heavy with 800k subscribers we could each donate $100 a month just for one year and we’d have $960 million enough for a flight and for a well designed probe to explore the lakes.
Doing the math made me realize what a bad SciFi idea "relativistic mass drivers" are. Even at 100,000g the lengths worked out in light seconds, or even AU, and impossibly straight. Not a weapon you could build into a planet, let alone a ship. You're not getting a projectile up to relativistic sped without ripping it to plasma, at which point it's a plasma cannon not a mass driver. Plus of course you need the energy in 1g of antimatter to accelerate 1g of matter to such speeds.
It depends on the split between delta-v delivered by infrastructure and delta-v delivered by rocket. If you propose a hybrid scheme that's "mostly rocket", then the following quote applies: “Many novel launch schemes need some amount of help from rockets. What kills a lot of them is doing a tradeoff study of just enlarging the rocket part and getting rid of the non-rocket part. Surprisingly often, that works out to be better and cheaper.” --Henry Spencer
I serve as a mass driver for my family every Sunday morning. Fortunately, I have yet to accelerate sufficiently to miss church and end up in orbit.
Severely underrated comment hahahaha
Not with that attitude you won't 😂
You must have daughters
@jasonGamesMaster don't you mean altitude... ok ejecting myself out the air lock
@downtostandup lol.
Ambassador Mollari: "Mass Drivers? They have been outlawed by every civilized planet!"
Lord Refa: "These are uncivilized times."
Ambassador Mollari: "We have treaties!"
Lord Refa: "Ink on a page!"
Babylon 5.
not the kind of mass drivers we're thinking of, But a good reference nonetheless
First place I heard and saw the concept :) I loved that scene, sadly the CGI didn't hold up as well on modern screens
@@isaacarthurSFIA Its funny you say that, I was actually surprised at how well the CGI held up. All the more impressive when you consider that it was done what were basically Commodore Amiga gaming computers, and not the fancy custom stuff most other CGI was rendered on at the time.
Love the "old tech" versus "new tech" format of this episode. Super interesting to see the math and physics explained.
I can't appreciate this enough thank you for explaining such unexplainable things in a comprehensive way
Happy anniversary. My nephew learned about you in school and I thought that was so cool since iv been watching for years.
That makes me happy! What did she learn about Isaac?
''WEEE!''
- Astronaut Homer Simpson, 1st Mass Driver Passenger
An orbital ring for earth
A mass driver for the moon
A space elevator for mars.
Mass driver on the orbital ring, and a space elevator to the orbital ring on Earth too.
Actually this config could be useful for all planets/Moon.
@jeechun I mean obviously you'd have elevators to the ring; but it isn't really the conventional concept since you don't end up in orbit.
@@jeechun also, the only reason you really want an orbital ring for earth or Mars is the atmosphere. You aren't in orbit, you are just high enough up to avoid atmosphere. So there is no real reason to build one for the moon, a mass driver on the surface is just as effective and likely much easier.
For Mars idk. But I'd like space elevator somewhere, and if it doesn't work on Mars, with its fast spin and low gravity, it works no where.
@@neolithictransitrevolution427 Right, on Moon there is not that much need for an orbital ring. High structures can be built there easily (if the terrain would cause some troubles, when building a mass driver oin the surface).
Orbital rings could be also handy, to help capturing interplanetary traffic, and allowing them to be built only for in space conditions. No need to use them in atmosphere any more.
I agree. Of course you realize that we have to remove Mars' moons to build an elevator there ;)
Taking the unfinished rollercoaster to space!!!
I love my Thursdays!
I read this in Red Alert Tim Curry
I still think for earth sized planets that skyhooks are the more promising tech in the short term. Mass drivers are far more useful for lower mass planets and moons with slower orbital speeds
I think the order goes expendable rockets, then reusable rockets, then skyhooks, and finally an orbital ring. I don't think any other options or order will make financial sense for launching from Earth. From other objects though, I expect mass drivers or centrifugal launchers to see a lot more use.
Unsurprisingly we have a skyhooks episode coming up in a couple months :)
@@faroncobb6040 excellent way to put it. I also think we’ll end up using mass drivers on a booster to launch cargo such as semi processed ore from no/low grav areas like the belt. It’s always going to be a mix of solutions and I’m very excited to live in this era of space travel!
@@faroncobb6040 COnsidering what I have seen from the one company that is currently researching centrifugal launchers, I am unconvinced that will be viable in the forseeable future. As an artillery piece, maybe. but not as a space launch option.
We are going to have space fountains before that. And once you have those, rockets become obsolete and you can built your first Ring.
If Gauss guns/ Whale guns/ Light Gas guns are mass drivers, shouldn't rockets be considered as mobile mass dispensers?
The dileation is vague, they are all just variations of the same fundamental principle.
*delineation
@@Kargoneth dileation the action of speaking or writing at length on (a subject).
I am not sure which one he meant
In the same way that incandescent light bulbs are space heaters maybe.
SRB test videos always bring back fun memories. I've witnessed two in person. My hometown was basically a bedroom community for Thiokol employees. I met a lot of important people when I was a kid, including Bob Ebeling.
19:54 super cool to see a tethered ring in the background of the mass driver
Happy Arthursday! If you're currently strapped to a rocket or mass-driver while listening, may your acceleration be smooth and your trajectory not intersect the ground.
I wish I could have upvoted this one ten times. Best SFIA episode in a long time.
During this times, most people I interact have a nihilistic worldview and don't really care about preserving humanity, it is a breath of fresh air to see projects to get us closer to avoiding mass extinctions.
There is no danger of a mass extinction and considering how economies all over the world are still growing, I would say your claim of widespread nihilism is also false. . What are you talking about?
First commenter is probably less than 20 and still in school where that mindset is most prevalent. If you are outside of that age range or in a cultural bubble that may be why the mindset seems strange to you
@@walterwilkinson7847 That would explain why he has such a weird and limited view of the world.
Earth will be fine. It's gone through many extinction events and is still going
Life will be fine. Life always uh uh finds a way
Humans won't go extinct. Were too adaptable.
Human civilization might fail in this version. The maybe in a thousand years, the next version of civilization will have better luck
Is a mass-driver rocket hybrid option feasible during the prototyping stage? A shorter mass driver would initially accelerate a smaller rocket, and at the end of the mass driver, the rocket would ignite and go about its way.
Fireball XL5
Regular Artillerie can fire rocket assisted projectiles, so it should work for mass-drivers to.
Would love to know how much less fuel a rocket (e.g falcon 9) would require if its initial velocity is 200km/h as opposed to 0km/h. Is anyone willing to do the calculations?
hah! that's exactly what I was thinking. we already use catapults on carrier aircraft, seems like it would make sense to do something similar for rockets.
Additionally, if you are trying to achieve a carbon neutral rocket, it seems to me that hydrolox and mass drivers would compliment each other quite well.
When I saw you were going to upload this video, I was so excited that I counted the days until it would come!!! Here it is 🎉
The video hints at it towards the end: would it be sensible to combine rocket and mass driver in one system? As in, having mass driver just a few hundred meters long, providing some initial acceleration to a rocket - a 500m mass driver should be able to accelerate to roughly 1000 km/h at 5g. Of course, the fuel and cost savings would not be that massive but the intial investment needed to build such a driver woulld also be comparatively low. And to me it seems like this could be implemented without too much further technological advancements needed?
Yes, and it will come up a bit more as a tandem option in our skyhooks rotovators episode in a couple months and later launch loops one, but I didn't want to extend this episode any longer
@@isaacarthurSFIAoooh a rotovator episode! Will you be examining instabilities of rotovators in steep gravitational fields?
I'm looking forward then!
🎯 Key points for quick navigation:
[03:37] 🚀 Mass drivers use Earth's mass for thrust.
[04:34] ⏳ Mass drivers offer faster launches.
[05:01] 🚀 Mass drivers can launch cargo at high accelerations.
[06:51] 🚀 Rockets expel propellant for thrust.
[07:17] 🔥 Hotter exhaust increases rocket speed.
[11:04] 🚀 Rockets require exponentially more fuel for higher speeds.
[15:03] 👶 Mass drivers are newer technology.
[15:57] 💸 Mass drivers have lower launch costs.
[17:16] ♻️ Mass drivers can be powered by renewable energy.
[18:09] 🛡️ Mass drivers are safer.
[19:32] ⚡ Efficient energy conversion is crucial for mass drivers.
[21:51] 💡 Variable Pitch Screw Launchers are more cost-effective.
[24:02] 🏗️ Variable Pitch Launchers use cheaper materials.
[25:21] 📈 Variable Pitch Launchers have a cost advantage at higher speeds.
[27:07] 💰 Mass drivers are cheaper for high-speed missions.
[28:00] 🚀 Rockets are expensive for high-speed missions.
[28:28] Overcoming atmospheric drag is a challenge for mass drivers.
[29:25] Variable Pitch Launchers use evacuated tubes.
[33:47] 💸 Rockets have lower upfront costs.
[34:43] 🚀 Rockets are adaptable.
[35:12] ♻️ Rockets are becoming safer.
[36:05] ⏳ Mass drivers are a promising future solution.
Informative as always Isaac.
Man, I need to read The Moon is a Harsh Mistress again.
Ja, Cobber, that you do! That Dinkum Thinkum is waiting. Mike says he has some new joke ideas for Trump. Something to do with #MoreLuigis .
Great work overall, but your last comment is wrong. Rockets are not so infrequent now that they have negligible environmental cost. On the contrary, we've been launching a lot of satellites, and the current use of rocket fuel in the upper atmosphere has significantly worsened the ozone layer, to the point that both poles have widening holes and we get more cosmic radiation exposure. We cannot let that keep going at the current pace, thus need alternatives like mass drivers to be used if we plan to keep expanding our non-earth presence. Given our growing demand for energy and satellites, getting these more expensive upfront programs working sooner than later is appropriate. Besides, so long as the economy grows faster than interest rates, deficit spending is a positive use of funds, if MMT is right.
I very much agree. We need to consider the total amount of additional pollution from rockets after factoring in their anticipated growth from now until a more sustainable solution becomes operational.
crazy idea maybe but couldnt you theoretically do like a balloon system? Have a super massive long blimp type balloon thats permanently in the high stratosphere with a several mile long built in tube. It would obviously need to only be for cargo that can withstand high G's but you wouldnt have to deal with but a tiny fraction of the air resistance and pressure. Maybe it could be only a mile or 2 long with this set up.
I'd imagine it like a permanent floating factory where cargo is sent up very cheaply from ground level via other balloons which drop their hot air back into the main system and then are dropped back to ground with a reusable parachute.
Lots of probably dumb ideas not well thought out, but it makes sense to me
Yeah! Love the "old tech" versus "new tech" format of this episode. Super interesting to see the math and physics explained.
I know plenty of folks have said it already but I’ll say it again:
Your voice is an additional flavor to this channel. It wouldn’t be right without it.
Don’t ever change unless you desire to as we, your audience, are more than happy with what you give us!
I think Mass Drivers are more at the futuristic side while rocket tech is still evolving
Tsiolkovsky's rocket equation is unchanged and blocks your path. 😅
Futuristic in the sense it works best in airless environments.
I think we should really push for building a mass driver, not just because it would work to accelerate accessibility to space, it would also create an absolute ton of construction jobs that couldn't currently be taken by AI and would absolutely supercharge the economy.
Aren't concerns already arising about how much material is getting thrown into low Earth orbit?
@@ryandebruys2762 who's gonna be throwing stuff into low orbit?
Perfect timing! Thank you
congrats on 800k subs!
Great stuff as usual.
I'm going comment again for the engagement algorithm but will do the search after the video. I'm almost certain this is where I learned about the Lofstrom Loop and active.... Wait. There they are in video. I'm glad an update is being considered :-D .
Happy Arthursday
Thanks for your optimistic take on humanity. I feel that we, earth citizens, are capable of so much more and we have to keep pushing for that.
Cheers from NZ, Wolfe
@18:00 The shockwaves during that rocket launch clip are crazy.
😆🤣 LOL I thought this was going to be about Drivers from Massachusetts!
Commonly known as Massxxxxx. I think you get the idea.
One idea, going off the bomb kettle fusion power plant model, would be the Orion Spudgun. Have a large kettle of water, a barrel pointed skyward that extends far enough to catch the ejected steam, and a ship with pusher plate/parachute to ride the geyser. Absolutely demented, but buildable under nearly century old science. Would actually be interesting to see in an alien invasion story where we get less than 20 years notice and need to figure out a way to get battleships or missiles into space in a hurry
Of course, you could also use the power captured from a bomb kettle plant to run magrails or the like if you don't want to follow in the tradition of one of humanity's first launches into outer space, though theoretically you could always use both
Happy Arthursday!
Just came here from Nebula to report a mis-upload, in hopes this gets noticed...
Your newest video on nano tech is actually the same "energy of the future" from a few weeks ago.
Hopefully it gets fixed soon...
Cheers!
Let's say a mass driver tube is straight vertical and located in Mt. Everest:
So 0.1-1 ton per meter of the mass driver tube x 70km = 70-700.000 tons that must be suspended in air.
But a mass driver won't be straight vertical so it's more likely over 1.000.000 tons suspended in the air (or 100.000 tons if it's made from unobtanium).
Yay Nebula plug!
You could even avoid needing an evacuated tube using a tethered ring and the variable pitch screw design. Hang the tube from the tether down to the surface with a screw pitch near zero, keeping the plug slow enough to drop a vehicle in front. Then keep the vehicle at a low speed as the tube slopes steeply upward, only accelerating to muzzle velocity once it's above most of the atmosphere. Since the tube is hanging from a ring, make it a full circle and slow the plug back down to return to the station. It would effectively be one of those moving walkways in Caves of Steel, but going from walking speed to orbital speed.
10:10 RIP S.A.B.R.E.
Reaction Engines Limited went out of business last October
YEah, buyt the ide amight return in some form some day
Pausing at three minutes with a random thought. So a "space gun" or even a "verne gun" is basically a extremely high acceleration mass driver with a very short barrel-length track, then?
I would say yes, a lot of these terms are fairly informal and have indistinct boundaries though.
At~8:30 mark, this is why hydrogen oxygen engines usually mix in a 6:1 ratio instead of the 9:1 for burning all the oxygen. About a third of the H2 is pushed out the back unburned for higher performance
Awesome comment!
Off topic but I got an email from the National Space Society and I saw that you where the president. As long as I watched your videos I never knew you were in charge of that. Neat!
Re: drones for holding up launch tubes. First, you don't need drones at all. You can mount propellers or other lifting devices directly to the launch tube. The more important question is how much propulsive efficiency are you going to lose towards the end of the launch tube. You're going to want to lift the end up as high as possible to get above as much of the atmosphere as you can. This becomes increasingly more important as your exit velocity goes up. Unfortunately, most atmospheric propulsion methods lose power the higher up you go, so you need more and more lifting devices for each additional unit length of launch tube.
The lift is generated by a prop and an electric motor. With altitude, the prop will get bigger and perhaps more expensive until it starts to resemble an Ingenuity propeller. However, the efficiency with which electricity is converted to torque and then lift may be more constant.
What If the planet Venus left our Solar System and was captured into orbit around either a Red Dwarf (M-Type Star) or Brown Dwarf (L-Type, T-Type or Y-Type)
So it's basically like semis vs huge trains. Semis are cheap and flexible, trains excel on fixed routes with high cargo volume
Thanks to friction , ima space heater .
A really large space based industry with space stations will have a lot of things manufactured in space. I think the future is in spin launch like technology for raw materials to space where space industry uses continuous sunlight for energy for building out space based industry.
It can get started on earth, but consider that Spinlaunch's current suborbital spin launch platform already launches with almost enough velocity to escape lunar gravity entirely. Imagine what one could do without an atmosphere on the surface of the moon. And, I think there's good reason to not use a lot of chemical rockets blowing around lunar dust.
Bows technically are mass drivers. We've been experimenting with mass drivers since the stone age.
My Face When Issac mentions the Tyranny of the Rocket Equation. ☺️👍
Whoosh! Zoom! Buzz! Zeeyoop! Fwang! The sound of a rocket-propelled mag-lev LIM sled careening down a progressively-pitched magnetic screw!
Your mileage may vary.
Could the tube work in opposite way, with several points along the track pushing large amounts of overpressured gas as the train passes by them and thus the train being pushed outward of the tube?
This video could have been titled _Mass Drivers are Neat!_
We should probably be comparing mass drivers to the mass-produced, extremely reliable, rapidly reusable rockets of 50 years from now.
Meanwhile, the Principality of Zeon is all, Zaku this and Gelgoog that.
At some point, I predict we'll use a whole mix of concepts.
Hyperloop as a space elevator then launch and catch at the top.
Make it long enough and aero dynamics would be null and void. Send any old box into space.
Could you do a video on microplastics? Both as an explainer but also how maybe it could be solved? It seems like a possible fermi paradox filter as well.
Reminds me of buck Rogers when they use the lunch thing to lunch ships with them lights coming down the tine then woo wee you into space
The problem with drones is the upper portion where the atmosphere is thin. Can't really do cheap drones high enough where the air is thin enough for the evacuated tube. Active support likely wins out in practice for that.
Active support may win out. Still, NASA/JPL demonstrated that drones can fly in a thin atmosphere with Ingenuity so I wouldn't count them out.
@@spaceinfrastructure3238 That's still dense enough of an atmosphere where launching a craft out at hypersonic velocities is going to generate a LOT of heat. If that's not a problem then why bother with the evacuated tube. Also flying a drone like that is one thing, flying a drone like that under load is another. Like I guess you could have drone lifting bodies for much of the tube that's in dense enough atmosphere and only have active support for the very end when that's not feasible, but I don't think you can do it with purely drones.
Babylon 5 was my introduction to mass drivers.
This came out an hour early. Nice.
It's kind of funny to me how much space exploration seems like a video game mechanic. It's not accessible until mid to late game, and the technological progression comes in tiers with prohibitive costs. As Isaac eloquently explains, you have to start off with rocketry which has low upfront capital requirements and huge operational costs, limiting you to very low throughput space operations serving low demand. The obvious "upgrades" that exist to reach higher throughput tech tiers have monstrous upfront capital requirements but then have rather low operational costs comparatively. A certain amount of profitable usage must be wringed out of the upgrade to break even and cross over into net profit territory. Rockets are sort of the early bootstrapping tech for space access. It's far from ideal, but if you want satellites and the modern luxuries and economic benefits of having them you sort of grit your teeth and go with it, lol. Just like well-designed game mechanics, you can't really short circuit this progression or cheat your way around it to break the game. Space itself, in all its absurd enormity, seems like those unexplored "fog of war" areas of a massive game world. The devs didn't put all that empty space in the game for us not to be intended to explore that. 😆
Why choose one? Mass drivers on the front hardpoints, missiles on the broadsides and lasers on turrets :)
Sky train in Vancouver has been around a while. That's a mass driver
Will then a skytrain system tiled up at 35 degrees 240km long and capable of 10G acceleration. But inside a near vaccum tube will work then ?
@SeanSoraghan I think that's after the Burnaby extension, but ya, I mean it's literally in the name.
My point was more that it also uses a linear induction motor. He was looking for examples.
@neolithictransitrevolution427
Intended more as a joke lol
@@SeanSoraghan my first reply was also joking. Then I realized if anyone read this they may not know what SkyTrain is lol
rocketman or cannonball man? cannonball sounds more fun
Read Robert A. Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. He talks extensively about mass drivers or as he called them, catapults.
Driving Mass Daily
Mass drivers as public transport would be rad.
The biggest problem with this episode is it's not Mass Drivers vs Rockets,
it's Mass Driver technology 1st stage -> Aviation technology 2nd stage -> Rocket technology 3rd stage -> Sky hook technology 4th stage -> Ion drive technology 5th stage.
Shoutout to SpaceX Starship which will bring the cost per kg so low and mass per year so high that it won't make sense to build anything else for a very long time. And it could use carbon neutral fuel too.
Fireball XL5!👍🏼
A few times during this video the music reminded me of the soundtrack from the Mass Effect series, which makes frequent use of mass drivers. (Perhaps that was intentional?)
I couldn't help but think thay was ironic since this sort of project would be massively (heh) easier if we could just get ahold of some of that setting's Element Zero (read: handwavium) to cheat code the equations.
I wonder if we could effectively launch space planes up the side of a tall mountain via low-pressure mass driver, then use rockets / hybrid engines with carbon neutral fuels to get the rest of the way. Could make for a decent intermediate stage until we built up bigger and better options.
Mass drivers would also allow to change the axis and speed of the rotation of the planet you put them on.
Harvesting Space Ice:
It occurred to me that we should separate the oxygen from the hydrogen in space. We keep the O2 for human use. Send down the hydrogen for terrestrial Fusion power, and use the waste Helium as a propellant.
I prefer the mass driver that goes directly to geosynchronous orbit.
Late Happy New Year 🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉
I like laser launch systems for earth, though gathering and focusing the beam may prove challenging.
At 20:32 you just used numbers to keep the math easy-to-use. Thank you
I am skeptical of mass drivers being a thing, at least on Earth, per se. I see it as being part of a orbital ring and/or tethered ring system. And even then, I think it is more feasible that people want to do space tethers more than mass drivers though technology used for mass drivers can be applied to tethers-I am imagining this scenario being your hypersonic suborbital-capable aircraft gets hooked or coupled to a sled and then accelerated upwards the tether until it reaches orbital velocity, either matching that of the end station or higher, and you can always decouple at any point up the tether to a lower orbit though this will require you to have your own rockets.
Mass drivers can also be used as part of a momentum-transfer tether system up in orbit to accelerate the spacecraft to escape velocity in an interplanetary trajectory. This can be useful even with ultra-high impulse nuclear propulsion systems.
If there would mass drivers on the ground, then it would be used not as a purely as a way to get to orbit but being able to accelerate a bigger payload so that rocket thrust is not required to accelerate a spacecraft from a standstill, so basically just a catapult up in the air before firing up the engines. This probably would enable high economic scale SSTO systems, especially when coupled with a tether but I don't have the numbers to back it up, not yet anyway.
On a more mundane note, I can see small scale mass drivers being employed at regular airports (I really don't think airplanes using good ol' aerodynamic wings are going away anytime soon and VSTOL is going to still be a niche). For an aircraft, the engines use the most fuel per second accelerating to take-off speeds and also create a lot of noise. This will encounter some engineering, practical, and operation challenges (including safety questions that need to be answered) but a mass driver/electromagnetic catapult that can accelerate an airliner up to take-off speeds would be useful and you don't need it to do it like aircraft carrier launches, either. In this case, pilots just need to set a power output that would keep them climbing (in noise mitigation areas, pilots have a short window of time to throttle back the engines from take-off power to reduce noise).
Of course, we haven't discussed the potential military applications of mass drivers. In the Halo expanded universe novels, during the war with the Covenant, humanity's colonies have used mass drivers to launch projectiles from the surface in an effort to fight enemy ships as the UNSC is always outgunned when it comes to space warfare (the UNSC, especially when the Spartans are involved, tend to prevail on ground or surface warfare but they are very outclassed when it comes to spaceships).
I've looked into mass drivers and linear motors specifically. There's patents for various types but patents don't actually require any proof an idea will work. In scientific papers, which _do_ require a prototype or at least a simulation or mathematical model to prove it could work, nobody has built one to go above Mach 1 with magnetic levitation linear motors. The highest speed work was NASA stuff from like 20 years ago, and nobody else appears to be pushing the top speed any further with physical prototypes that I could find. The main issue is "edge effects" because the shoe on the vehicle is much shorter than the stator and so magnetic effects on the ends of that shoe cause lots of power loss at high speed and nobody appears to have tried solving that yet.
The NASA paper is "High Velocity Linear Induction Launcher with Exit-Edge Compensation for Testing of Aerospace Components" by Kuznetsov & Marriott, they got to ~180 m/s or mach 0.5.
Do you have relevant expertise on magnetic loss mechanisms? You might be able to contribute!
Why light gas guns haven’t seen any applications outside of R&D, I don’t understand. They’re relatively cheap to operate and give railgun-like velocities without all the infrastructure needed.
we should build a mass driver not to reach orbit, but to reach mach 3 so we can use it for hypersonic experiments and develop a cheap and reliable ram jet.
Yo I've tried searching for the song in your description Brandon Lieu into the storm, but I can't find a working link. The spotify play button was grayed out and the youtube video was private.
Can you provide a working link?
August storm by darthbill68. First search result on yt when I search "into the storm brandon liew"
Don't know much about physics, but am i correct in assuming that mass drivers more or less rely on the same physics principles as for example Ion thrusters, wherein they need a supply of small but constant energy to accelerate the vehicle, by means of low to zero friction, just adding to the momentum and kinetic energy of it
Mass drivers are to ion thrusters as elephants are to fruit flies.
Say mass driver and most picture a linear electromagnetic motor. My question is mass drive so limited as to exclude rotary motors as in a spin launch like platform?
I think SpinLaunch is a mass driver. Also, potentially a good one from a physics and economics perspective.
@spaceinfrastructure3238 I think it has great potential for launching raw materials for processing in a space based industry. Take water. Send buckets of it to space. Use solar PV to turn it into rocket fuel. Then fuel or refuel rockets in space allowing one to ground launch traditional rockets with more payload or less fuel. Several spinlaunched orbital accelerator might even be repurposed as booster rockets that can be attached in orbit to a heavy rocket that needs to get to higher orbit.
Space stations in orbits that aren't shaded by earth or the moon can benefit from continuous energy from the sun for processing raw materials from the earth and moon.
Consider the current SpinLaunch suborbital launch platform already launches with a velocity close to a lunar escape velocity, and the potential implications this has for a future space based industry.
A couple writing glitches in this one. The segment on the significance of different rocket fuels' relative masses and exhaust velocities is good, but at the end you go on a weird tangent comparing them to absolute quantities like LEO velocity or the time it would take to reach Alpha Centauri(?!), as if a rocket had a "top speed" at its exhaust velocity. Of course in reality we routinely reach orbit and beyond despite no chemical rocket's exhaust velocity being nearly that fast. Going faster than their exhaust is one of the two biggest tricks rockets do.
The part about transport jets' fuselages being able to handle negative pressure starts out just plain wrong. "Overpressure" is a reference to excessive positive gauge pressure, not negative gauge pressure. The clause and tolerance you speak of and highlight on the screen are referring to the fuselage withstanding positive pressure loads a bit beyond what the pressure relief valve can be set to. The page onscreen starts right out saying that it's talking about positive pressures that start at zero. You do then recover to the unrelated spec that fuselages need to withstand 1psi negative gauge pressure.
The use of the term "overpressure" to describe "negative pressure" was technically incorrect and aeronautical engineers need to be precise. But in SciFi, I can imagine Scotty screaming, as the Enterprise sinks into a gas giant, "Captain, she canna handle the overpressure!!"
various types of porous environments life could live in, like methane or ammonia as alternatives to water but it would be the atmosphere
Isaac, you uploaded the wrong video on nebula today. You uploaded the "Upcoming Energy Technologies" video again, but you named it "Nanotechnology: the future of everything".
I'm curious. In water, it's possible to pump air in front of a vehicle to speed it up, by reducing the pressure in front of it. Is it possible to do anything similar in atmosphere? Could you, say, pump hydrogen, or some other gas, in front of a moving vehicle, to reduce its atmospheric drag, without putting it in complete vacuum? If so, I would think it might be worth doing on a mass driver, since having a massively long vacuum chamber seems prohibitive.
an oxygen molecule is 32, not 16, which is a single atom of it.
I wish we had mass relays
I wonder how a standard shipping container system would affect the cost of a mass driver over rockets? How about 16050 KG?
So where on earth would be the best place for a driver?
No where, the best place would be in orbit on an Orbital ring.
But failing that, a launch loop between Mauritius and Australia over the Indian ocean is probably best. Equatorial and out of the way.
Many engineers and physicists agree that the best place for a ground-based mass driver is close to the equator and at a high altitude. Launching near the equator provides a “rotational boost” because the Earth’s surface moves fastest there, giving the payload extra initial velocity. High-altitude sites reduce the amount of dense atmosphere the payload must travel through, which cuts down on drag and energy requirements. Potential locations include the Andes Mountains in Ecuador and Mount Kenya in Africa-both high-elevation areas near the equator. You'd probably want to build the mass driver along a mountain slope, taking advantage of the natural elevation so that fewer materials are needed for structural support and foundations.
@@andrewsallans589 not in my back yard!
@@Yoel_Mizrachi lol
@@Yoel_Mizrachilol I was going to say the same, just because my backyard can't possibly accomodate it, (and theelectricity bills would be off the roof)
We could do a crowdfunded mission to titan lakes and use falcon heavy with 800k subscribers we could each donate $100 a month just for one year and we’d have $960 million enough for a flight and for a well designed probe to explore the lakes.
I thought it said, 'New Drivers versys Rockets"
Doing the math made me realize what a bad SciFi idea "relativistic mass drivers" are. Even at 100,000g the lengths worked out in light seconds, or even AU, and impossibly straight. Not a weapon you could build into a planet, let alone a ship. You're not getting a projectile up to relativistic sped without ripping it to plasma, at which point it's a plasma cannon not a mass driver. Plus of course you need the energy in 1g of antimatter to accelerate 1g of matter to such speeds.
I think it's chemical rocket to moon, mass drivers or nuclear from moon to mars and beyond.
is hybrid technology of driver assisted rocker takeoff a feasible idea?
It depends on the split between delta-v delivered by infrastructure and delta-v delivered by rocket. If you propose a hybrid scheme that's "mostly rocket", then the following quote applies: “Many novel launch schemes need some amount of help from rockets. What kills a lot of them is doing a tradeoff study of just enlarging the rocket part and getting rid of the non-rocket part. Surprisingly often, that works out to be better and cheaper.” --Henry Spencer