Spaceflight without propellant
Somewhat off-topic to APM
- Laser pushed solar sails.
- Other even more wild ideas.
Successive catapult orbit lifting system
Warning! you are moving into more speculative areas.
Wild idea - flaws likely:
The idea: Using a huge number of two part counter-rotating spacecraft in a huge number of sucessively higher circular orbits of earth as successive lift.
These could be manufactured even by conventional manufaturing instead of MainPage. But it's a question of how many are needed to get to reasonalbly small speed-steps and reasonable small journey times.
One would balance rotational impulse by sending as much stuff clockwise up as one sends sends counterclockwise back down. Sending stuff up counterclockwise too does not work to balance the impulse because the satellites all orbit one way.
At some height the perturbation of Earths gravitation field by the Moon will become a serious problem. So a question is: Can a (next wild idea) lunar space elevator reach wide enough beyond that point?
(wiki-TODO: The basic back of the envelope math for this seems quite straightforward - so do it eventually)
Why go to the trouble?
- Centuries of intense spaceflight might accumulate problematic amounts of gasses on the moon. Actually imagining all human made CO2 on Earth today placed on top of the moon might be serious business for spaceflight. Heat-shields needed, hampered electromagnetic launches, heck maybe even martian like near vacuum dust storms.
- Volatiles blown out of the earth moon system by the solar wind are absolutely and irrecoverably gone.
