Who: Ryan Lackey <[email protected]>
Objective: to put satellites into LEO, materials into higher orbit, and do so at <$500/kg to LEO.
Stage: some research, no detailed plan, looking for expertise
Technology: A "Ram Accelerator" -- essentially a 10km long, 1m bore cannon, to be built in a remote location, ideally on a mountain near the equator (Ecuador? Ethiopia? Somalia?). 500 m/s chemical gun at the breach, projectile enters a tube 10km filled with ~10 different mixtures of natural gas and oxygen. Projectile is shaped like a ramjet core (cones), so it compresses/detonates fuel, causing constant acceleration. Leaves muzzle at 10 km/s. Hits atmosphere, massive boom. Projectile contains booster rocket and circularizing rocket.
Projectile peak G load is ~5-10k G, which is a non-issue for solid state/potted electronics. Deployables can be immersed in incompressible liquid fuel.
When: "Someday". I'm not an expert in aerospace/mechanical engineering, so I'd need to find solid cofounders, and would like to validate the idea more. It's been researched extensively at UW, Boeing, and other places over the past 15y. Production scale is a $50-100mm project. Subscale is maybe $5mm.
Fellowship product: Detailed computer simulation and answers to key questions (barrel erosion, payloads/capacities, costs, market)
Final Product: Probably a LEO satcom/sensing constellation, or delivered components to orbit, rather than launch services themselves, due to unique characteristics of launch platform.
Links for reference: http://ramaccelerator.org/home/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ram_accelerator http://www.tbfg.org/papers/Ram%20Accelerator%20Technical%20Risks%20ISDC07.pdf
(I have full-time other things to do, but I wanted to write this up just to get feedback from people smarter than me.)