VASIMR May Well Be The Workhorse Engine For Intra Solar System Transport

Things like tugs, and shuttles, working from near earth orbit, to the moon and back, as well as from the moon to the (relatively) nearby planets, and LaGrange points for solar orbit. These could be the miracle workers to put chemical rockets to shame.

I hasten to add, however, that in my opinion, to put the final nail into the chemical rocket coffin (for all but a few, specialized, niche application areas, in any case) , we will need what I like to call "Accelerate In Place" systems; which is of course what mass drivers are. This is why I have called for the building of an underwater, suspended mass driver tunnel system to be designed and built; starting from deep ocean trenches near the equator in the Pacific ocean, and extending up at a gradual angle for some three hundred miles or so, before exiting out into the atmosphere (say at about another thousand feet or so).

Only with a system like that can we ever hope to achieve the kinds of truly industrial throughput capacities to make large lunar installations -- like the Gateway City project to accommodate the entire world's participation -- possible.

Once we get a big lunar installation in place though, I further envision a much bigger exploitation of "Accelerate In Place." And that is with building truly immense mass drivers; taking advantage of the sun's abundant power through vast arrays of solar collectors; something we'd be able to do with the kind of robotic manufacture infrastructure a "Gateway City" size habitat would allow for. And in this, of course, my favorite is very large, dual accelerator wheel and spoke stations that would be many tens, or even hundreds, of kilometers in diameter.

With something like that, and some new materials engineering, we could get deep space probes accelerated before launch to significant factions of the speed of light; transferring the need for fuel to the exclusive problem of deceleration (along with imaginative uses of solar sails, as well as aero braking through hopefully available gas giants).

Just some more speculative stuff for the dreamers in all of us to think on.

'DO WE WANT TO GET TO MARS OR NOT?'

The Astronaut Who Might Actually Get Us To Mars

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The improbable journey of Franklin Chang Díaz, who immigrated to the U.S. at eighteen, became an astronaut, tied the record for most spaceflights, and now might hold the key to deep space travel.