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
A rail gun is basically a gun that uses electromagnets to accelerate the payload rather than rockets or an explosion. They can theoretically be used to accelerate things to far greater speed than conventional guns, but that comes with some caveats:
a) With the level of technology we have right now, the wear on the rails inside the gun is horrific–they need to be replaced after every couple of shots.
b) They can’t really be used for anything very large yet either.
As for using them to launch stuff into space? The problem you have there is the atmosphere. Orbital velocity is around 17,000mph, so to fire an object into space with any type of gun, it has to be going quite a bit faster than that in order to compensate for gravity and air resistance. Anything hitting the atmosphere at those sort of speeds will rapidly heat up–you can see this when spacecraft re-enter the atmosphere from orbit, and bear in mind that those are hitting the really thin atmosphere high up, not the thick stuff lower down. Chances are trying to fire something at 17,000mph anywhere near sea level would immediately destroy it. And then, even if you could somehow get around all that, it wouldn’t remove the need for whatever you’re launching to have its own propulsion system, because once it gets out into space it needs some way to circularise the orbit–otherwise, it’ll just come straight back down.
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