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Rail-Launched Scramjets To Space
NASA is looking into rail-launched scramjets, air-breathing jet engines driven my supersonic combustion. Early designs envision a 2-mile-long track at Kennedy Space Center shooting a Mach 10-capable carrier aircraft to the upper reaches of the atmosphere (see below). Then a second stage booster would fire to lift a satellite or spacecraft into orbit.
( Rail-launched aircraft and spacecraft concept.)
The scramjet launcher project could form the foundation of a future Advanced Space Launch System, with elements spread across different NASA centers to make it work, agency officials said.But there are some challenges. To launch on an electrified track, for instance, the track would have to withstand at least 10 times the speeds commonly seen on tracks used for roller coasters, NASA scientists said. Roller coasters typically run about 60 mph (100 kph), they added.
SF fans recall the 1933 novel When Worlds Collide by Philip Wylie and Edwin Balmer. In the story, an astronomer discovers that a pair of planet will soon blunder into the solar system. One will destroy the Earth, the other will assume a stable orbit.
Scientists work to build a ship that will transport enough people and earth animals and plant to the new world. The 1951 film adaptation shows this rail-launched craft.
(From When Worlds Collide trailer)
Update 29-Jan-2025: This illustration of a spacecraft launching from an upward-curving ramp is from The Shot into Infinity (1929) by Otto Willi Gail:
(The spacecraft ramp from 'The Shot into Infinity' by Otto Willi Gail)A slope rising from the shore offered a good natural foundation for the starting track. Massive girders were erected in the depressions, the irregularities of the ridges were leveled off, and the natural and artificial supports so obtained were joined by great iron rails.
Thus resulted an absolutely straight runway, twelve meters wide and almost two kilometers long. It ran horizontally for a few hundred meters from the future starting point, then gradually rose, ending like a spring-board at the highest point of the slope, the gradient being thirty percent...
The gigantic flying machine trembled, and a shrill screaming sounded over the fields, so that the people ducked their heads in terror. The upper two auxiliary exhausts had been started, spitting out behind them conical streams of fire. Slowly the space ship moved onto the rails of the runway — slowly for just a moment, for then it was off in a mad dash.
QUICKER and ever quicker the ship rushed ahead. After a second it was taking the incline. It raced up the slope with a speed many times that of an express train. In ten seconds it was past the kilometer mark — and now the brilliant gigantic butterfly was rising, freed from its rollers, freely floating into the night.
It was an overwhelming sight! A sea of yellowish light flooded the densely packed multitude. An outburst of thunderous applause followed the space ship.
End update.
Take a look at the full trailer for When Worlds Collide. Via Space .com; thanks to Randall Glenn Modesto for submitting this story.
Scroll down for more stories in the same category. (Story submitted 9/15/2010)
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I might also be thinking of K-9 from Doctor Who.
