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To get astronauts into space requires an incredible amount of fuel (for example, the Saturn V rocket that launched the Apollo mission carried 770,000 liters of kerosene, as well as liquid oxygen as an oxidizer), so researchers have long studied alternatives to rockets, such as scissor lifts, kinetic launch systems or railsotron (essentially a huge catapult).
The latter is currently being worked on in China. The idea of the system is to accelerate the spacecraft along a giant electromagnetic launch track to a speed of Mach 1.6 (and in the future – to Mach 5), and then it will start its own engines and leave the Earth’s atmosphere, accelerating to indicators that are approximately 7 times exceed the speed of sound.
The Aircraft Technology Research Institute of China Aerospace Science and Industry Corporation (CASIC) has already built a two-kilometer test track in Datong, Shanxi Province.
A railgun that can accelerate a ship to mach 1.6 with passengers on board must be at least 8km long (and much longer for mach 5). The problem is that this will require a large number of electromagnets, which will require cryogenic cooling (and therefore a huge vacuum chamber, which does not even exist in nature), as well as a specific airlock so that the vehicle can reach supersonic speed (if the system does not will work perfectly — a very nasty accident, close to a tactical nuclear weapon, could occur).
Another issue is that, for example, the rail drones launched by fighter jets from the aircraft carrier USS Gerald R. Ford use 121 MJ to accelerate the aircraft to 241 km/h. To accelerate a vehicle of the same mass to Mach 5, the Chinese rail-tron would need a staggering 50,000 MJ (and the spaceplane, which will be used in the future, will weigh at least 10 times more).
That is, for the operation of such an electromagnetic gun, a nuclear power plant will be needed, which will generate gigajoules per second, and a completely new supercapacitor will be needed to store energy. (Dresden’s Hochfeld-Magnetlabor Dresden has a state-of-the-art capacitor bank that can withstand 50 MJ, which is a world record, but not enough for a reisotron).
The Chinese claim that if the Realsotron system is successful, it will reduce the cost of launching into orbit to $60/kg (at SpaceX, by comparison, the cost is now $3,000/kg).
Source: South China Morning Post (via New Atlas)
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