Support ETSMD

The Earth-to-Space Mass Driver, a concept for electromagnetic launch of
large payloads directly to outer space from Earth deserves your support.

We have seen rocket launch costs increase hundredsfold since the heydey
of American spaceflight, with no expansion of man's physical exploration
into the solar system.

Small science and unmanned missions to the planets are great, and if
launch costs decreased a hundredfold then they could correspondingly
increase.

While receiving millions and millions and billions and billions of
dollars of publicy funded development, the space shuttle program, the
most effective means to put people and cargo into Earth orbit, is
mothballed and worthless, although it did much good, when it cost
$25,000 per pound to send stuff to orbit.

Current private sector initiatives such as the Ansari X-Prize of ten
million dollars have been offered to the first commercial launch to put
a man 100000 meters, 100 kilometers high, and return him, and a variety
of private commercial concerns have spents tens of millions of dollars
towards achieving that aim. If geostationary orbit is 36000 kilometers
above Earth then that's almost five percentage points of the way there.

The going rate for a two or three day trip to the International Space
Station, designed, built, and operated at a cost of over ten billion
dollars to date, is in the ballpark of twenty million dollars.

To send anything to the moon, it costs probably upwards of a hundred
thousand dollars per pound. To send the hot dog machine would cost as
much as it takes to build the stadium here on Earth.

That's part of the attraction of the Earth to Space Mass Driver, ETSMD:
it's built here on Earth, and all the components to repair are here on
Earth, and it's completely emissions-free in its green operation, and
there are few moving parts except the escape velocity launch round, the
pod that has been accelerated to Mach 25-30 and directly exits Earth's
atmosphere within seconds and then can nudge itself as if by a feather
towards any destination orbit within the solar system.

There are technical unknowns in the design and construction of the
ETSMD. Many funded academic research papers have come to the conclusion
that the ETSMD is feasible with almost off-the-shelf parts, and launch
cost estimates range from pennies per pound to an amortized five to ten
dollars a pound. This is where the space shuttle had cost estimates of
five hundred a pound.

The technical unknowns include very real pulsed power switching
questions, I am rather ignorant as to the exact nature of those
sidetracks, but laboratory launches of test masses on comparatively
nominal budgets have shown sufficient promise to merit larger scale test
and implementation.

Do you think humanity should have manned research and ecnomic
development stations throughout the solar system, where the people there
can expect to live and safely return to Earth? If that's so, then there
must be removed the prohibitive cost of access to space, and one of the
most feasible options is electromagnetic gun launch to space, EGLTS, and
one of the best of those options is the coilgun, ETSMD.

Jules Verne's fictional travellers were shot by a cannon to the moon.
It wasn't until World War II with von Braun and the V2 rockets that
rocketry was considered good enough for anything besides fireworks.
They'll still make decent fireworks. EGLTS was conceptualized at the
turn of last century, not halfway through it.

Support alternate launch tracks, small science, and the big science of
the ETSMD. By so doing you would support man's conquest of space.

Regards,

Ross Finlayson