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.
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.
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.