Launching And Traveling Through Space One thing NASA is doing has really caught my interest and that is testing a launch system which flings rockets into the stratosphere. The ultimate goal is to be able to throw them up to 200,000 feet into the air. The lowest possible orbit is 491,000 feet, but this only allows for one complete orbit. Obviously, these projectiles will need fuel to complete their trip. A rocket uses most of its fuel getting from the earth to space, so if it could hold off firing its rocket for 200,000 feet it would save a considerable amount of fuel. SpinLaunch is a rather new startup company with a unique idea, but it is not the first company to try and throw things into space. Years ago, a company was formed to develop a huge cannon to shoot things into space. Unfortunately, the cannon was never finished and the company went bankrupt. The idea of using a cannon this way was actually an old idea and appeared in the Jules Verne story, From The Earth To The Moon. People have been trying out how to launch things without using as much fuel for quite a while. Ideas like carrying a rocket up in a huge balloon is one idea and then when the balloon reaches its maximum height, launching the rocket. A helium balloon is said to be able to reach an altitude of about 24 miles. This is higher than many first rocket stages so it would save all the fuel used by the first stage and more. Over the years smaller rockets have been launched just a few times by balloons, but we have heard of many instances where bigger rockets would be. There are a couple of companies with planes capable of carrying a rocket high into the atmosphere and then launching them. One of the companies is Stratolaunch, and they built the biggest airplane in the world to use to carry the rocket. The plane was designed to carry a rocket to about 35,000 feet and then launch it. Paul Allen from Microsoft fame was behind the company and when he died the company fell apart and finally failed. It is said the plane did launch at least one small missile, but even that meant nothing, because that type of missile could easily be launched by other more normal planes. I think every scientist knows improving ways to save rocket fuel is just a stop gap measure. Rockets are just too slow and inefficient to be practical for space travel. We shouldn’t have to wait years for a rocket to get to a planet in our own solar system. Let’s look at the times to the planets by rocket travel. If we start with Mercury, we have a problem. Though it could be reached in about 40 days, it would take many years for one to land because of having to make orbital adjustments. To reach Venus would take about 5 months. We can reach Mars in about 8 months. If we wanted to reach Jupiter it takes about 6 years on average but can be faster in some circumstances. The trip to Saturn takes about one year longer. Uranus takes about 8.5 years to reach and Neptune about 10 years, but New Horizons is expected to reach it in 8.5 years. I think we can all see how useless some of those times are. Remember we are talking about a one way trip, so it would take over twice the time to travel to one of these planets and back by chemical rocket. We can increase the speed using nuclear powered rockets. The thrust of a nuclear rocket is about 3 times faster than a chemical rocket which cuts down on the travel time. We also have to figure the positions of the planets and whether they are at the closest, farthest points or somewhere in between. Nuclear rockets are not the answer but they are somewhat faster. If we had some sort of craft which could travel at the speed of light, we could reach Uranus in 3 hours and 20 minutes. Good enough for solar system travel, but too slow for traveling to other solar systems. There has been some talk about trying to figure out how to use quantum entanglement in propelling a spacecraft. We have found if we use quantum entanglement, we can instantly affect another particle instantly no matter what distance away it is. Could you imagine if someday we could travel instantly to anywhere in the universe? While this might be our ultimate goal, if we ever could figure this out, it might take hundreds or thousands of years. I am sure there would be many stages in between. One has to wonder if we perfected anti-gravity as the rumors state. If we did, how fast would this allow us to go? One scientist thinks it might be possible using an anti-gravity engine to approach the speed of light without killing those inside the vehicle. The craft would repel off of other bodies in space as it travels. This might be a far more reasonable way to get around the solar system in the near future. I hate to say this but it will be a very long time before we get the ability to travel to other solar systems in the future unless an incredible breakthrough is made. I didn’t forget the Ion engine which builds speed as it travels. It is considered impractical for shorter trips because of the way it operates. It takes years to reach top speed of 60 miles a second or 216,000 miles per hour. A problem is the thrust of an Ion engine is very weak and that is why it takes so long to build to the top speed, which then eliminates the engine from contention in many instances. If we could somehow boost the exhaust, it would be quite helpful. The engine is so slow in accelerating, it takes two days to get to a car’s highway speed.
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