A Train to Space: All Aboard the 20,000-Mile-Per-Hour Low-Earth-Orbit Express

-Kuro-Interesting... Hmmm.
I would have thought that this would be overuled with the space elevator being built in Japan. However,this is still amazing.

I support this idea over others I've seen. Love it!

Reminds me of this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q6F0Zu4GQyI&feature=related

Very ambitious and very unrealistic and eccentric that serves no real purpose. Let's not forget about the sheer unimaginable engineering required for this feat! Come on people, let's come up with something useful for $60 billion! Sometimes we see nonsense, and this constitutes just that.
Go make a ride at an amusement park.

Comparing the cost to the shuttle cost is somewhat deceiving, as in one case you're comparing a one-time estimated up-front building cost and in the other you're stating known real-world costs over 3 decades. Historically speaking, at the start of the Space Shuttle program NASA estimated that the program would cost about $43 billion in development/non-recurring costs, and $54M per flight. They also estimated the cost to deliver payload to low earth orbit at $635 per pound. All of those numbers are in 2011 dollars. But the reality was far different from that.

I'd bet if they actually tried to get this thing running, it would cost double that up front, and $10 billion a year to run.

And here's the biggie. You have to run 200 million amps all the time just to keep the tube from collapsing. Anybody see a problem with that? One single power failure (as a result of anything from faulty wiring to a terrorist attack) and it sounds like this thing comes right back down to earth... hard.

A space elevator sounds about 10 times more practical than this.

It is a very interesting idea. I did notice they are launching a space shutttle looking type train\plane and yet it has no front wing. Perhaps they unfold later, upon landing. But then they are stored inside, taking up space. I guess the vehicle itself maybe another task and no problem really.
Was the space shuttle train\plane included in the cost of the $60 billion rail that reaches space only?

Seems very cool!

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Science sees no further than what it can sense, i.e. facts.
Religion sees beyond the senses, i.e. faith.

we should build the base of this where we can support it with stuff that's already there, instead of say on the plains find a big huge mountain with a plateau on the top, the ozarks might be a good choice if we're looking at central america. or if it's going to suit the world's needs then we could easily have it built up in the Himalaya's, take the express trip to the top of Mount Everest. we'd be advancing a third world country and increasing the speed at which we investigate the stars. a win win in my book.

second to all those who say that space travel is downright useless: you obviously are not thinking with the mind of an entrepreneur. first of all there's interplanetary travel to begin with, people have itchy feat and having the spaceship in low earth orbit to begin with probably reduces the cost of missions and trips by more than half, it'll still cost an arm and a leg to gt the actual people to the ship itself but at least your transporting just a person and not all the water clothes and food that is needed to support the person.

another concept would be asteroid harvesting; to my knowledge asteroids have a make up that is kinda like a geological survey of whatever came crashing through the solar system during the early Pleistocene. and they are also small which means that when you take a simple metal detector to the stars you'll find asteroids that have high contents of stuff like uranium, neodymium, manganese, and other rare earths that are actually in fact really freaking rare.

we could finally clean up space! and set up our very own dyson sphere! it'd be just like the sci-fi novels!

but here is the coup de grace: titanium! with this system we could probably reduce the true cost of making and casting titanium by building a low earth orbit factory tat could make all the bloody titanium we'd ever want. it's stronger than steal and burns before it melts, it doesn't oxidize that i know of in normal earth atmosphere and it would generally be a killer construction material if it wasn't for the cost of it.

to mars or bust!

The inventor of Maglev must be getting Senile. Maglev works great in close but at 12 miles? I don't think so.
A field strong enough to do that would disrupt everything in that hemisphere of the planet. And as for the space elevator anyone that thinks that would work needs to find out what a sprite is. And No I'm not referring to a soft drink but to an ultra high power lightning bolt from near space to ground. NOTHING man made could withstand that much power.

Very imaginative, but don't think so. First, who said Maglev is successful? Yes it works, but is incredible expensive. I doubt it will be a primary means of train transportation in the near future if ever. Any that are built will only serve as one-ups-manship to show who can spend the most money, but whose reasonably practical. Same here only multiplied by say three or more orders of magnitude. Interesting as theory nevertheless.

I do not think it is a viable concept. I believe the idea is good, to use maglev "bullets" to be shot in the space, but the placing of the "cannon" is not really great. I would build it under the sea, that way, it can go for miles for to speed up, cooling would be easier - not sure how to purify the cooling water works - and it would be stable, just need to find a place where underwater earthquakes are fairly rare.

I know, air resistance is an issue, but by the time it would be ready to use, i believe the material and aeronautics design will advance enough to come up with something, that has better properties (design or material).

And if you use it do deliver only cargo - hopefully automatic assembly robots as well - you do not need to worry about gravitational dampening, as far I know living beings does not tolerate too well hyper acceleration or deceleration for that matter.

After this, automatic assembly robots could build proper space stations, ones that actually can be used as space ports, more like the Tsiolkovsky space station.

It would take an Über amount of power to do what they would want it to do and power costs today are out the window. Not to mention it would be a no-fly zone for planes.

By the way, Apoca-Risk why do you have to feel so obliged to attack someone with obviously more intelligence than you, due to the fact you are not on topic, but simply bastardizing a fellow commenter? Stop being a dick and provide positive input, or don't comment at all!

so a rocket is safer? sitting on top of all that fuel? hell no

yes this is pricy but worth it. build it in the middle of the dessert. have a dedicated nuclear reactor for the power source. u dont want this in the sea because it would be an easy target for a enemy sub. even it it cost twice the price once finished it would still be worth it. as a first step in space mining the pay offs would be huge.

but its just 1 link in a chain to a space elevator for human travel to a orbital industrial complex. sure its a dream but its a dream worth having. why build spacecraft on earth when u could build them in space. yes a practical space port for mining shipments, travel to mars, the moon, asteroid belt and maybe beyond.

there are people who cant see the big picture. people who say there are better ways to spend the money. they said it when the idea of space travel was first talked about. they were wrong then and they are wrong now. sure at first glance 60 billion is alot and 120 is a hell of alot right? no. how much money have we spent on 2 wars over the last 10 years? what was the financial rewards? zip zero nada. 20billion a year for a 10 year build. 200 billion for the launcher, vehicle, and reactor. when finished, an operational budget would be less than people think because the extra energy produced from the reactor could be sold to the grid. one launch a week could be achievable.

now if we could get the line to be flexible enough to sit on the ground when not in use and rise when needed so it doesnt need the constant power to stay lifted, that would be best. make it adjustable and possibly launch into higher orbit.

its just a dream. (so was cell phones, fast cars, airplanes, trains, and rocket ships and at 1 point someone said they couldnt be done too)

If it accelerated at a constant rate from 0 to 5.6 miles per second, over the course of five minutes, that portion of the track would be 840 miles long...

damn Tim, did you feel that? cheers

Thats the internet for ya

A structure that can hold a vacume with a volume of that size is unfeasible. At best you could send raw materials into space using this method. Unless $'s are not objects.

Like Robert Goddard said, "Every vision is a joke before the first man accomplishes it"

I don't believe we are close to having many of the technologies needed to build this regardless of the claim in the article. We cannot suspend a tube 12 miles in the air and keep it there even if it was going straight up (which it wouldn't be). We certainly can't build a open ended vacuum tunnel strong enough to handle a 20,000 mph shuttle passing through it. Will this be tried some day. Of course it will, but that is far off in the future.

These are just fanciful ideas put out by successful and technically competent people to showcase their creative skills as well as their field of technology. They know it won't be build in their lifetimes but the ideas are interesting to talk about.

On the financial side, you can barely build a reasonably distanced regular maglev train for 60 Billion!! And that is using technology we know works today. Maybe more like a trillion ... if we had the technology.

If you have the ability to magnetically levitate something to an altitude of two miles why not use that principle alone to launch your rocket.

@ghost and D13
the mountain idea seems far more plausible but to keep with the gist of the idea, can we build a man-made mountain that is 12 miles high? Sounds pretty expensive and would take a long time if it is even possible. It's only guess work for me but I would think you can't generate those kinds of speeds in an enclosed tunnel without a vacuum. That also means that you have a vehicle hitting a "wall" of air when it is released (hence the needed release height). That seems quite different from designing a hypersonic aircraft.

The worst thing about this idea is that it doesn't seem very scalable. You can't build a useful scaled down model to prove the concept. It's pretty much all or nothing which to me means that it won't even be tried until it is no longer such an expensive project. As I commented earlier, that 60 billion number is a joke.

This thing got a name yet? I nominate 'Spitwad'.

220 million amps. That's so far beyond welding yer feet to the floor. That's like military grade scattering field kinda amps, with a whole buttload of 'em hittin the end of the muzzle just before the mass does. So these new taxis yer talking here; the drivers gotta get a medallion or pass some kind of scramjet driving seminar online, or what?

Check out: www.blacklightpower.com

Dr. Mills has licensed 7 power plants, which produce over 750MW of power. The process is completely green, resulting only in the release of oxygen from water and using the hydrogen to create heat as the electron is forced into a lower orbitals.

Dr. Mills has also, unified the forces of nature by using only Maxwell's equations, Newton's laws of motion, and Einstein's relativity theory. No "quantum mechanics" needed. His theories explains everything from the microscopic to the macroscopic.

He also has a design on a car power plant that uses the heat from his process to directly drive an electric motor. No need for hydrogen storage. The hydrogen is produced as needed, then a state change, heat produced and used to drive the electric motor.

His claim is that this will replace all motive types of transport. Land, sea, air and space.

120 years ago people said the same things about airplanes: interesting and ambitious, but eccentric, infeasible and potentially impossible. I'll defer to history, the guy with the doctorate in nuclear engineering from MIT, the guy with a Ph.D. in Aerospace and Mechanical Sciences from Princeton and the folks at Sandia over my mere notion that this is only fantasy.

Good luck sirs. I hope to ride this some day.