All space development efforts are hindered by the cost of placing payloads in orbit. Reducing launch costs allows more mass to be placed into orbit for a given budget. Most of the weight (mass) in any rocket is used to launch the fuel and not the payload. Electromagnetic (EM) railguns or mass drivers would avoid that problem. A major assumption made in the paper is that construction materials including solar panels do not have the same accelerations limits as humans.


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    Title :

    Mass Drivers for Space Construction


    Contributors:

    Conference:

    Earth and Space 2014 ; 2014 ; St. Louis, Missouri


    Published in:

    Publication date :

    2015-06-15




    Type of media :

    Conference paper


    Type of material :

    Electronic Resource


    Language :

    English



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