Pretty straight forward question really. What are rail guns, how do they work and how likely is it that they will replace stage one rockets in the future? Why have they not done so already? Is it feasible? Or would the astronauts just get pasted due to the extreme acceleration?
In: Technology
Others have already talked about the technical challanges, but yes, the extreme acceleration is a prohibitive problem for most tasks:
In order to reach space, and then stay in space, you need a speed of 8km/s, or 5 miles per second. Say we build a really long railgun, lets say 2000 meters long. In order to go from zero to 8km/s within 2000 meters, you need an acceleration of 1600g. Not only is that enough to kill any astronaut a hundred times over, its too much for pretty much anything except raw materials. You certainly cannot use it for something like a satellite or a space station module.
So, even if we solved the other problems like air friction, we would either have to build them hundreds or thousands of kilometers long, or would be restricted to use them for raw materialy only.
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