A Cannon for Shooting Supplies into Space

wrote:

"John Hunter wants to shoot stuff into space
with a 3,600-foot gun. And he’s dead serious—
he’s done the math. Making deliveries to an
orbital outpost on a rocket costs $5,000 per
pound, but using a space gun would cost just
$250 per pound."

See:
http://www.popsci.com/technology/art...supplies-space

I recall Saddam Hussein at one point before the Iraq wars had a project
going that was called the "world gun". Fire from a long enough barrel
and use a projectile that can adjust its orbit near the apogee of its
original orbit and you can shot in one direction and the projectile can
do a couple of orbits and hit anywhere on the planet. Accuracy would
suck for the first several hundred shots and by then commandos will have
shown up and taken the facility out.

Using the peak of a mountain to get as far out of the atmosphere as
possible is a really good idea. Launching sturdy raw materials not
delicate manufacted materials is an even better idea.

Sounds like an okay plan to deliver supplies to a space station, except
for the problem of teams of commandos arriving because you've ****ed off
a nation in the target zone ...

Jeff Findley wrote:
This isn't something that violates physics, but it's likely that you're
going to need *A LOT* of R&D to make this work reliably. That and you can't
launch much more than really durable cargo with this thing (e.g. food,
water, LOX, LN2, LH3, and etc.).

Nuclear warheads...the thing is pretty similar in concept to the Iraqi
"Big Babylon" cannon, except this one can be traversed to aim at
different targets.

Pat

Doug Freyburger wrote:
I recall Saddam Hussein at one point before the Iraq wars had a project
going that was called the "world gun". Fire from a long enough barrel
and use a projectile that can adjust its orbit near the apogee of its
original orbit and you can shot in one direction and the projectile can
do a couple of orbits and hit anywhere on the planet. Accuracy would
suck for the first several hundred shots and by then commandos will have
shown up and taken the facility out.

Besides being a sitting duck target for an air strike, it was also too
big to be slewed to aim at different targets:
http://www.astronautix.com/lvfam/gunnched.htm
Although a lot of people assume Israel's Mossad assassinated him over
the cannon, it was more likely they offed him over his work on IRBMs
using Scud technology: http://www.thespacereview.com/article/1498/1

Pat

The magnetic rail gun, with a mag lev track up the side of a mountain,
cutting launch costs dramatically for water and other durables that
would survive the acceleration