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China is building a railgun that can hurl crewed spacecraft into orbit (newatlas.com)

submitted 6 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Rockets being passé, China is working on using an electromagnetic railgun to launch crewed spacecraft the size of a Boeing 737, weighing 50 tonnes, into orbit. This remarkably ambitious project is even more ambitious than it seems at first glance.

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[–] nBodyProblem 2 points 6 months ago

The article states the company in question is only trying to achieve somewhere between Mach 1.6 and Mach 5. It will need a rail miles long, but more importantly the bulk of the velocity change needed to get to orbit will come from rockets.

It takes 9-10 km/s of delta-V in a real world scenario to get to low earth orbit. That’s about Mach 27 or so, a long ways away from Mach 1.6 or even Mach 5.