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Old 06-17-2016, 07:19 PM   #2735
photon
The new goggles also do nothing.
 
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Join Date: Oct 2001
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Excess weight and complexity probably isn't worth the payoff. Flying with wings only gets you tens of thousands of feet, and only gets you a thousand (optimistically) of the 25,000+ km/hr needed to reach low earth orbit. You get in a few tens of seconds of extra rocket what you'd gain with all that extra stuff.

Gliding back worked for the shuttle, but that's a lot of extra mass and complexity, where SpaceX is reusing to land what it already had to lug up (plus extra fuel). The shuttle didn't end up being very reusable.

At least with current technology, but some of the engines they've been looking at lately might make it possible.

Personally I like the idea of a railgun type slingshot into space

There's a wikipedia article on non-rocket launch ideas:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-rocket_spacelaunch
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