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Comment by xnx

1 day ago

Starcloud isn't even worth the attention to point out what an infeasible idea it is.

Maybe SpinLaunch can get it up there. And the power for the SpinLaunch motor can come from Solar Roadways.

  • There was a video from Scott Manley about this several years back. And he was very skeptical that it's even feasible for SpinLaunch to place something useful into orbit. And they haven't yet.

    • Both SpinLaunch and Solar Roadways are pure farce.

      Here is how to think about them: It doesn't matter how open your mind is, you will not fly by believing in your idea and working hard and never giving up developing strength and technique to jump higher.

      Even though these things are all true: Everything that ever worked started out not working. You can fly a little bit by just jumping. You can even demonstrate progress by jumping harder.

  • SpinLaunch could work but from the Moon, sending stuff back to Earth.

    • The atmosphere and gravity are only some of the problems with spinlaunch. Spinlaunch rotates at 600 rpm. That means the projectile is tumbling at 600 rpm when let go.

      Maybe for solid masses not in an atmosphere, meaning the payload can be a ball and doesn't have to have a pencil shape and doesn't need to point in any particular direction, maybe that can work to simply lob rocks or aluminum ingots into earth orbit.

      Except just think about that for a second. Lobbing rocks from the moon towards earth...

      And why would we want to do this anyway? What resources are so valuable on the moon that it's worth getting them that way?

      The payload would actually have to have rockets, fuel, computers, heat shielding, and a means to reshape itself so that it can: stop it's own tumble after launch, deploy glide wings, and survive reentry to a controlled landing so that we don't have to use rockets from Earth to go collect the payload from orbit.

      It's all surely physically doable but why?

      Even if orbit was the final usage destination not Earth, like to build stations, that still seems like a stretch.