Physicist John Hunter has proposed the construction of a 1.1-kilometer-long cannon that could fire a 450 kg payload into orbit. David Shiga writes in New Scientist:
Pictured is a HARP gun, a Cold War-era device used to fire instruments into the upper atmosphere.
Link via Popular Science | Image: NASA
The gun is based on a smaller device Hunter helped to build in the 1990s while at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in California. With a barrel 47 metres long, it used compressed hydrogen gas to fire projectiles weighing a few kilograms at speeds of up to 3 kilometres per second.
Now Hunter and two other ex-LLNL scientists have set up a company called Quicklaunch, based in San Diego, California, to create a more powerful version of the gun.
At the Space Investment Summit in Boston last week, Hunter described a design for a 1.1-kilometre-long gun that he says could launch 450-kilogram payloads at 6 kilometres per second. A small rocket engine would then boost the projectile into low-Earth orbit.
Pictured is a HARP gun, a Cold War-era device used to fire instruments into the upper atmosphere.
Link via Popular Science | Image: NASA
Comments (10)
6 lighters:
http://www.willitblend.com/videos.aspx?video=bic
When archery training we used to put a lighter at 60 or 80 feet, with a lit candle 3 feet under it.
The first one to explode his arrow won!
The guy from Will It Blend was on the show, though and it was one of his blenders.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uv75-ODx-NU
(1:20 into the video)