You know of a decent Skylon website Keith? I mean progress reports.
jd
-----Original Message-----
From: arocket-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:arocket-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On
Behalf Of Keith Henson
Sent: woensdag 23 december 2015 8:42
To: arocket@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [AR] Re: SpaceX F9 Launch/Update -- Live Link
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