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Now that India has become just the fourth nation to ever complete a safe landing on the moon, China is looking to up the ante in the space race.
China, one of the other three countries to have completed a safe lunar landing along with the United States and the former Soviet Union (Russia, however, didn’t fare very well recently), has had its space agency experimenting with the idea of using a giant electromagnetic railgun to launch astronauts into space.
According to IFL Science, the reason for this wacky idea is because of the cost.
Since our long-promised space elevators from Japan don’t seem to be imminently close to being completed, startup SpinLaunch has gone ahead and created a centrifugal launch system, which fires a payload at over 1,600 kilometers per hour (1,000 miles per hour).
Unfortunately, it puts g-forces of up 10,000 on the items it spins, meaning it would obliterate any human used as the payload. So, that won’t work.
Which brings us to China and their giant electromagnetic railgun.
The South China Morning Post reports that Chinese scientists and engineers are trying to “use a giant electromagnetic launch track to accelerate a hypersonic aircraft to Mach 1.6. The aircraft would then separate from the track, ignite its engine and enter near space at seven times the speed of sound.”
The space plane they want to use as part of this “Tengyun project” that was introduced in 2016 is longer than a Boeing 737 and weighs over 55 tons.
Despite that, they believe it can be done.
“Electromagnetic launch technology provides a promising solution to overcome these challenges and has emerged as a strategic frontier technology being pursued by the world’s leading nations,” the team from the magnetoelectric general department of China Aerospace Science and Industry Corporation’s (CASIC) Flight Vehicle Technology Research Institute wrote in a paper published in the journal Acta Aeronautica.
To achieve this goal, they have constructed a 1.2 mile low-vacuum track high-speed maglev test facility in the Datong, Shanxi province which can propel a heavy object to speeds approaching 620 MPH. Eventually, the length of the test line will be extended to achieve a maximum speed of over 3,000 MPH.
While it may be a bit of a rough ride at takeoff, they believe the worst thing passengers might experience is brief dizziness or weightlessness.
So, who wants to be the first volunteer?