https://www.google.com/maps/place/Chimborazo/@-1.4685873,-79...
And if, at 6,000 feet, air pressure were half that of sea level, nobody would live in Denver and most Tibetans would be dead. Half is more like 6,000 meters.
For related reasons, its difficult-to-reach, low oxygen, snow-covered summit is not ideally suited for building and maintaining a space launch site.
And then there is this whole science and tech imperialism. Maybe Ecuadorans don't want roads and launch complexes cut out of their high mountains. Hawaii is going through this issue right now with new telescopes on Mauna Kea, and Ecuador has a strong indigenous rights movement, including the party in power at times.
The thing is, with rocket size increasing, payload increases cubically while air resistance is squared. So for the really big rockets, altitude is not as big of a factor as being near the equator.
If I am not wrong, propulsive landing on drone ships uses another roughly 10% fuel (depends on launch trajectory, etc).
As fossil fuels are non-renewable, and Hydrogen expensive, I am very sure (and even hope to be correct) that in the future we will see launches from high-altitude equatorial regions, using booster-capture technologies and perhaps even terestial-power-assisted launches. Those things may reduce the fuel-cost of escape velocity by 30+%, and when we're sending enough stuff into orbit that this is too advantageous to ignore, we will do it.
But for now, the best way to go is to get really good at building bigger rockets.
Total impulse required to blow through drag forces is a nasty nasty power law.
It wouldn't be that difficult to make a linear rail launcher in a vacuum, or on the moon. Air resistance really is the whole problem.
If you can put the launcher above the atmosphere, it's 100% worth the effort.
I'm aware. That's the math I did in my comment, solving for 0.5 atm.
Air density at the top of Everest is 1/3 of sea level, and because of the Earth's shape, Chimborazo's 20,000 feet (6,000 meters) is actually further from the Earth's center than Everest, so half pressure sounds pretty reasonable: https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=942816...
>All that momentum is then harnessed to catapult a payload into space at speeds one source said could be around 3,000 miles per hour.
So that's what I was working off of. Admittedly, it's unclear who that source is. And 8k is still less than half of LEO.
And right, I'm familiar with orbital mechanics and would never turn down free dv, but you get ~90% of that even out of somewhere as far off the equator as CCAFS. The bigger benefit would be if you're looking to launch into a low inclination (equatorial) orbit you can avoid the dv required for the plane change, but that would work just as well out of CSG.
The altitude itself would be the only advantage I could see over somewhere like CSG.
But the heat load due to atmospheric friction would be immense and immediate.
The US built an antiballistic missile system that included a missile called Sprint [1]. It accelerated at 100G and developed temperatures of over 3000°C less than 5 seconds after launch. A video here [2].
It's a formidible engineering challenge to make a vehicle and payload that will survive such a difficult flight regime with commercially attractive economics. At this point, I don't understand SpinLaunch's advantage over earlier projectile systems (Gerald Bull) or current launchers like SpaceX. This will be interesting to follow.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprint_(missile) [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=msXtgTVMcuA
I'll be back, if anyone wants to follow along at home, post your answers when you are ready.
Check your own numbers at: http://www.calctool.org/CALC/phys/newtonian/centrifugal
That's reasonable _for humans_. No one's going to launch a human by this thing, though, I hope.
Hyperloop, magnets, battery arrays, solar, boring company, etc sounds pretty cool.