Interesting Links for 22-03-2012

[andrewducker]

• We finally understand what electroconvulsive therapy does
  (tags: psychology brain ect depression )
• Symbian smartphone share drops below Winows Phone. Less than 5% in total.
  (tags: mobile_phones epicfail nokia microsoft )
• Who wants to go into space in a Star Tram?
  (tags: Startram technology space )
• Are you a smoker pissed off by the tax increase

Comments

[autopope]

The star tram idea lost me at the "if we have a superconducting cable carrying 200 million amperes" point.

It's a bit like saying "if we have a working He3 aneutronic fusion reactor" -- theoretically possible, but oy are there some minor engineering problems in the way!

[andrewducker]

There are also some great comments pointing out that building things in the polar regions is not at all easy.

[danieldwilliam]

I thought there were significant advantages of launching things near the equator.

I was thinking the Northern Territory would be a better location.

[danieldwilliam]

Did any of those comments include the difficulty of wielding a spanner in minus 50 degrees C?

Or the corrosive power of penguin crap?

[andrewducker]

The former, not so much the latter ;->

[cartesiandaemon]

I did wonder which bits of the idea were like that. OTOH, they claim phase one is to simply try to build one that ends by going up a mountain: that sounded less implausible to me, but I don't know if it's actually _plausible_ without a lot of new technology?

[autopope]

The trouble with going up a mountain is that we don't have any sufficiently high mountains. Everest nearly reaches the tropopause -- the boundary between the troposphere and the stratosphere -- but not quite. And I suspect there'd be a slight out-cry if anyone proposed building a railgun up the side of Everest, let alone the happy fun failure modes when your launch trajectory (west to east) happens to fail for a payload passing over China.

And even if you poke your railgun muzzle up into the stratosphere, you're going to need a heat shield on your payloads because the frictional heating of punching through air (even at 10% of ground level pressure) at Mach 20 is not insubstantial.

Edit: There is a place where this scheme might be practical, of course ... on Mars, specifically up the flank of Olympus Mons. At the summit you're near-as-dammit in hard vacuum, and you don't need anything like as long a run-up anyway because orbital velocity on Mars is a lot lower than on Earth.

[andrewducker]

See also the comment from draxar, above, pointing out that electronics would not function within a large area of the launcher.