I don’t understand why these chemical rockets and another flight to the moon are needed. Isn’t it a dead end? And pointless carbon emissions on the way?
Nuclear fusion gives a path to clean energy and allows star-flight. Chemical rockets don’t.
Nuclear fusion gives a path to clean energy and allows star-flight. Chemical rockets don’t.
You simply need someone to really push it, and you can get there. Instead of having the status quo keepers running the things on fossil fuels and collecting guaranteed income to build even larger yachts.
You can use atmosphere as the propellant. And accelerate as much as you need at the upper levels of atmosphere. Potentially you can use aerodynamics (basically fly inverted) to get to even higher velocity than the orbital velocity. Then, you can stay there at the upper levels, as long as you need to, and charge your tanks (you can initially take off with an empty tank of propellant). Once this is done, you can adjust the angle of attack and ease of into the higher orbit, switching to space flight.
It involves hypersonic flight, but there is nothing impossible here.
I remember a few videos of launching small rockets with a ground based laser from some twenty years ago. Haven’t laser technology improved since?
Fission reactors have the same problem. It is possible to use them in space but not to get into space.
Fission rockets are useless for launching to space because the thrust is too low, or the weight is too high. They could be useful in space because their higher exhaust velocity. But high exhaust velocity means low thrust.