Up, Up, and Away... (eventually)

This should be a short note. It covers something that it seems people should have figured out about 50 years ago- Scrap NASA.

Ok, maybe not everyone. Just the nitwit who decided that launching rockets at the heavens was the way to get payloads in orbit.

There are two elements to being in orbit: be far enough away from the surface to be above most of the atmosphere, and be going fast enough (minimum) to keep up with any particular spot on the Earth's surface.

I know... I know... shooting off rockets is fun! But we're talking results, not entertainment. The same RESULTS can be obtained by a two-piece system consisting of a lifter that gets altitude (that distance-away-from-surface thing) from a large balloon and the actual spaceship that only needs to go up a little further and gain that slightly faster lateral speed.

So, we're talking a simple dirigible built for a reasonably high speed (horizontally) with gas bags sized to lift a few hundred tons. Once the spaceplane part lifts off, the lifter can practically drift back down. The spaceplane takes off from the lifter and accelerates up into space at whatever angle works best for the orbit it's headed for. It can glide back down. I think the space shuttle demonstrated that.

This whole scenario gives us an orbital delivery system that puts a lot of loose hardware in orbit without using disposable boosters or other trash-generating nonsense. I really think it might cut down on the physical risk to the crews, as well. If you design well and throw in some luck, the lifter could possibly rendezvous with an incoming ship and pick up the crew, if nothing else, in case of emergency. It beats the heck out of our current system.

This important, at least until we start mining asteroids. Any starship we build is going to eat up quite a bit of material. We might as well get it up there with a little finesse. It all hinges on kicking our addiction to loud noise  and bright lights.

That kind of leads me into one other thing already mentioned- where we're headed. The practical side of that will be both picking where we want to go and then getting there. And it is a practical problem. Perhaps we should send out some telescopes in opposite directions. When you look up àt the stars, they appear kinda 2D right? So we need some paralax. That could do a bunch of useful things. You can get a more accurate idea of how far away a star is, you can maybe get an even better idea about any planets where you're headed, and we may even see things we'd otherwise miss. It seems like a good investment, to me.

Perhaps it's good that we don't have an FTL drive. The crew won't have any doubt about which way is home. Imagine that we do have a warp drive (or a 'Punch' drive?). We go interstellar and suddenly we're there instead of here. You then count on being able to pick out one dimmish yellow dwarf out of billions of stars. Maybe even worse because you won't be 100% certain that where you are is where you wanted to go. Well, we will have even better computers and image-matching software. An additional issue is that at FTL speeds, what we aim at won't be where we see it when we get there. It'll be 10 or 20 or 50 years along its orbit. We will have to mind our p's and q's on the trip.

I'm going out and buy stock in yhe company that makes Carafate. There are going to be lots of ulcers before we call this job done!