Actually the Shuttle was kind of a political boondoggle and technical mismarvel before it was even born. There are some good technologies in it–the lifting body concept, the Shuttle Main Engines (the most powerful for their size in the world), et cetera–but also a lot of obsolescence (the original control and guidance systems used Apollo-era transistor computers with iron-core memory, which are less powerful than a 1977 TRS-80), and tied into what are, in retrospect, poor design choices (the Thiokol SRBs, the delicate ceramic “foam” tiles, et cetera.) It became the single, do-all and be-all compromise that it is because of the politics surrounding it. The O’Neillian space advocates wanted a SSTO (single stage to orbit) craft, Congress wanted something cheaper and and reusable as compared to Apollo, NASA needed a dedicated mission, and aerospace contractors (and their Congressional patrons who were concerned about bringing and keeping jobs within their districts) wanted a piece of the pie.
As a result, the Shuttle was born, in which virtually every major contractor had a feeding tube and every possible capability was built in, but it doesn’t do any particular mission very well. It isn’t SSTO, it isn’t cheap (costs are on par or exceeding those of Apollo), it isn’t reusable, and it doesn’t really have a mission, other than supporting the ISS. In fact, the only thing it really does well is…keep aerospace contractors in cashflow.
The smart thing to do in the early Seventies would have been to start a Shuttle-type test and development program, similar to the X programs for human transport and maintain an expanded Apollo and Apollo Applications program for heavy lift capability and trans-Lunar missions, while working on technological maturity and cost reduction on the Saturn family of rockets. In retrospect this is what happened with the Soyuz, which has turned out very nicely for the Russians. By not only investing heavily in the Shuttle but also deliberately destroying Apollo/Saturn hardware and tooling (and even a lot of the documentation) .
Hindsight is, of course, much clearer than staring into the winds of the future, but the debate over the Shuttle’s safety, efficiency, and performance began long before things started burning through and falling off of it. That we’ve inextractibly tied the American space program into such a folly is our lament and our Achilles heel.
An electromagnetic catapult is one of those things that sounds simple in concept but fiendishly difficult in the complexity of its details and necessary technology development. For instance, you have to build it powerful enough not only to launch a payload at orbital speed, but with additional speed to overcome aerodynamic drag…which increases with speed and results in aerodynamic heating. You would be dealing with the same problems on launch as most vehicles see at re-entry, and this at near-sea-level pressures. Ideally you’d built it going up the tallest mountain you can, so as to both reduce atmospheric pressure and to gain as much powered distance as possible to reduce induced acceleration loads, but structurally mountains tend to be unstable and covered with snow and ice to boot. Powering such a thing is not trivial, either; it’s not as if you can just flick a switch and dial up the rheostat; you need not only a tremendous amount of energy but you need it quickly, and at some point your ability to throughput enough energy without having your transmission system evaporate becomes prohibitive. (In other words, you are going to need some very large, very efficient superconductors.) And then you are going to generate ubermassive magnetic fields, likely strong enough to interfere with living organisms and nearby electromagnetic systems.
The engineering difficulties are sufficient to make an Orion rocket seem trivial by comparison. A magnetic catapult is highly speculative at this point.
Stranger
