Scientists came to a brand new idea how to deliver the food and stuff to the International Space Station: they want to shoot it with a cannon. Sounds weird? It is. And they want 500 million dollars to build it...
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A physicist has proposed using a 1.1 km long cannon to deliver cargo to the International Space Station, and says the cost would be around 250 dollars per pound which is a lot cheaper than 5,000 dollars per pound it currently costs to make deliveries using a rocket.
John Hunter, bases its plans on previous work they carried out at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. In 1992 he and his colleagues fired a 130 m cannon built to test launch hypersonic engines. Its piston, driven by methane, compressed hydrogen gas that expanded up the barrel of the over-sized gun to shoot the projectile.
The new cannon design has replaced the methane piston with a combustion system burning natural gas in a heat exchanger inside a chamber of hydrogen gas. The combustion system heats the hydrogen to 1,430C which increases the gas pressure. An operator then opens a valve to allow the hot, pressurized hydrogen into the 1100-meter-long barrel of the gun, where it instantly expands, shooting the projectile out and into space.
Hunter calculates the pressure would be sufficient to launch a 450 kg payload at six kilometres per second. The process would produce 5,000 Gs, and so would only be suitable for rugged payloads such as strengthened satellites and rocket fuel. Hunter said the system could not be used as a people-launcher because a person shot out of the cannon "would probably get compressed to half their size," causing instant death. Hunter said that the projectile will clear the atmosphere in under 100 seconds.
Hunter's proposal is to operate the cannon from the ocean near the equator, where the Earth's faster rotation will help launch payloads into space. The cannon would float, with 490 m of it below the surface, where it would be stabilized by ballast. Hunter plans to test a three meter prototype in a water tank in February, and a full-size cannon could be built within seven years, if he can raise the required 500 million dollars.
In the case you didn't die of laughter, let us see a small drawbacks to that plan. First, 500 mil for a cannon is too much money for shooting on the moon. Second, after so many years of space era a return to Jules Verne is simply stupid. Third, what's the use of cannon "for rugged payloads"; what we'll do with sensitive equipment and astronauts? Fourth, who'll pick up that payload up there in the orbit?
And if some rich investor reads this: please give me 500 mils, I'll come up with some idea. ■