Using Large Cannons to launch Spaceships ?

[MonkeyMensch]

*Originally posted by scotth *
**
…Of course, the Earth spins. This would leave the launching point someplace else when the object comes back through… **

Hey, now! Every picture I’ve ever seen has the big mountain with the cannon up at the North Pole, so it isn’t going to rotate anywhere!

But that gives me an idea. I fire the body horizontally fast enough to have an orbital period of 11 hours 58 minutes, or so, and when the body comes around it reloads the gun!

[Sock_Munkey]

The best site for an EM launcher would be in the Andes at the equator, the air on the leeward side is nice and dry.
Anyhow, I think the most practical space plane setup would be as follows:

• EM launcher to get that sucker moving fast enough for the air-breathing ramjets kick in.
• Ramjets fire untill the air gets to thin.
• Rocketskicks in and takes space plane into orbit.

[Sock_Munkey]

I should never type when I’m sleepy…

[Tuckerfan]

*Originally posted by Scuba_Ben *
**I remember seeing a TV special a few years ago, probably on Discovery Channel, about some rocket scientist in the 30s (?? 50s??) had experimented with cannon-launched craft. He was considered “on the fringe” and his work was never followed up. Anybody recall this show?

Also, Jules Verne described a cannon-launched, manned ship in his famous novel, From the Earth to the Moon. Checking www.literature.com, he used a nine-foot-wide hollow ball, with an aluminum shell, and he located his cannon near Tampa, FL – both not too different from modern crafts’ aluminum hulls and KSC at Cape Canaveral. **

You’re probably thinking of Gerald Bull, who managed to work out the design problems with a “supergun” to the point where Mossad felt it necessary to assassinate him. (Seems he’d been working for Iraq to figure out how to get the idea to work.)

One might be able to use an electromagnetic catapult to send people and things into orbit, but IIRC, it’d take a hell of a lot of juice, and it’d scramble the on-board electronics something fierce.