Skylon will cope with the traffic, but I would dearly love to have
multiple transport solutions for a really large scale power satellite
project. Replacing fossil fuel in a reasonable time (decade) takes
around 15 million tons per year to LEO and around 12 million tons to
GEO. That's around 120 flights an hour. At a two minute headway,
that would take a not unreasonable 4 runways within 1-200 km of the
equator.
Some descendant of a Falcon Heavy might lift 4 x the 15 ton for a
Skylon. That gets it down to 30 flights an hour or one every two
minutes.
I can scale from aircraft operations, but I don't know about rockets,
not sure anyone has ever considered it. Do any of you have an idea of
how many launch pads and how big the base would have to be to support
a launch every two minutes?
If not, any thoughts on how fast a Falcon could be turned around and
how far apart the launch pads would have to be to prevent one
exploding from setting off a chain reaction?
I know Musk is utterly down on power satellites.
Keith