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this post was submitted on 15 Mar 2024
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You'd still need engines and fuel onboard, or you couldn't circularize the orbit. The idea is more just get something out of the atmosphere with something that doesn't itself have to be dragged along for the ride, then do the rest of it once you don't have atmospheric drag and you aren't fighting directly against gravity anymore.
It's kind of the same as the idea of "what if the first stage was a big air-breathing plane that just, like, flew really high and really fast?" that keeps cropping up, just finding a way to make the first part of the process less absurdly expensive.
But no matter what you can't put something into orbit with a single input of velocity unless that was enough to remove it from the Earth's sphere of influence entirely, because you can't make the lowest point in an orbit higher than the point you're currently at.
Absolutely impossible. The problem isn't the angle, the problem is that orbits are circular. The "orbit" would have to go around in circular motion until until it reaches the point where it exited the railgun (after accounting for the rotation of the earth and all the other nonsense you need to account for).
What you said, but the orbits are elliptical. The periapsis (lowest orbital altitude) would be the point where the craft exits the rail launch - located within earth's atmosphere.
I think the next evolution after the raillaunch would be a hybrid engine that breathes air and functions in a vacuum so we could have small SSTO craft.
What if the interior of the railgun accelerator was all a vacuum and the exit point was really really really really tall? So that impact with atmosphere at the exit of the gun was lower.
This is what StarTram is, the launch system maintains a vacuum. The system won't work without that feature.
The problem is that you still need an additional acceleration in order to get into an real orbit. In any theoretical orbit (without an acceleration) you'll always go around in a circular motion until you reach your starting point, if your starting point is in the atmosphere then you'll go around your orbit until you hit your starting point in the atmosphere again. This will obviously cause your orbit to decay. There are a few solutions.
I love the idea of combining the rail launch with a skyhook. Skyhooks always sounded like they would fail due to atmospheric concerns which this would alleviate.