Could a giant railgun shoot into space?

Could a giant railgun shoot into space?

Railguns can acheive a muzzle velocity of a projectile on the order of 7.5 km/s. The Earth’s escape velocity is 11.2 km/s. It seems to me that a railgun style launch device built into a deep shaft such as an abandoned mine could reasonably launch a vehicle into space.

Can we use a railgun to launch spacecraft?

Rev Up The Rail Gun A 240,000-horsepower linear motor converts 180 megawatts into an electromagnetic force that propels a scramjet carrying a spacecraft down a two-mile-long track. The craft accelerates from 0 to 1,100 mph (Mach 1.5) in under 60 seconds— fast, but at less than 3 Gs, safe for manned flight.

Can we shoot something into space?

However, a space gun has never been successfully used to launch an object into orbit or out of Earth’s gravitational pull.

Is a rail gun more powerful?

This means that while a normal gun might manage a projectile speed of around 2km/s, a railgun could blast out projectiles 50 per cent faster, at at least 3km/s. …

Has a gun ever been fired in space?

In 1975, the Soviet Union did something that had never been done in space before. They fired a gun from a space station, the one and only time such a thing has happened. It was an event that was only uncovered after the fall of the USSR in the early 1990s.

Does NASA have space weapons?

As of September 2017, there are no known operative orbital weapons systems, but several nations have deployed orbital surveillance networks to observe other nations or armed forces. Several orbital weaponry systems were designed by the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War.

Are Space Elevators Possible?

A space elevator is possible with today’s technology, researchers say (we just need to dangle it off the moon) Space elevators would dramatically reduce the cost of reaching space but have never been technologically feasible.

Why don’t we throw garbage in space?

There are just two problems: humans produce an enormous amount of garbage; and rocket launches are extremely expensive. Even if engineers could bring down prices by a factor of 10, it would still be thousands of dollars to launch the garbage into space.

Why do Railguns destroy themselves?

This is because the electric current actually flows through the projectile from one rail to the other rail[1]. This produces huge amounts of wear on the barrel, making it extremely difficult to maintain the barrel.