October 2009 Archives

In order to keep the International Space Station up in the sky, the station needs fuel and other supplies.  Instead of sending expensive space shuttles up to refuel the station, physicist John Hunter is proposing using a 1.1 km long gun that could launch a 450 kg payload at 6 km per second.  A small rocket engine would propel the payload into a low orbit around the Earth.  Of course, no human beings could take this ride up to the International Space Station because of the sheer amount of g force.  Projectiles would only be in the Earth's atmosphere for 100 seconds.  The gun would cost $500 million to build.

Shooting rocket fuel from Earth to the International Space Station using a gun is a pretty ridiculous idea.  I have trouble imagining a 1.1 km long gun.  However, because I learned about this article from Slashdot, I also learned that Hunter was not the first one to think about using a gun.  In his book From the Earth to the Moon, author Jules Verne wrote about using a gun to propel the crew of the Columbiad to the Moon.  If only NASA tried Verne's idea for bombarding the moon instead of its LCROSS mission!  Or maybe NASA should have used Megatron instead: