Engines to reach the orbit and - later - other planets

Navy directed-energy programme moves on
The US armed forces' vision of fielding lasers that can shoot down missiles, microwaves that squirt pulses of energy to disable enemy electronics and guns that fire projectiles huge distances using electro-magnetic (EM) forces is moving closer to reality, according to the US Navy's manager for directed energy (DE), Capt Roger McGinnis.
[Jane's Defence Weekly - first posted to http://jdw.janes.com – 27 August 2004]

Interesting stuff. Magnetic rail gun for payload launch possibility?

Do the Artemis Society and the Artemis Project know of this?

Somewhere at theier homepage they say that they want to launch electromagnetically from the moon. They might have worked on it allready but I didn't find results when I looked for them at their site last time.



Dipl.-Volkswirt (bdvb) Augustin (Political Economist)

Yeah, the concept is to catch a payload by a cable suspended down from a spacecraft. To catch a payload, the point is that the spacecraft is not on an orbit but virtually hanging in some altitude above a given place of Earth´s surface.

Isn't that the cheapest way? Built an 'huge-ass' station in orbit which just simply picks payloads up from suborbit?

You wouldnt need any huge rocket to get up there, so if you make the grabber completely electric you can just user enormous batteries that can be recharged by the solar panels.

Simple and effective, but who's gonna built it?