My father is the John Cole quoted in the CNN article and it's his office that is managing the maglev (among a lot of much more interesting projects), so I am familiar with this particular project.
No one at NASA want's to use maglev as the only method for putting anything into orbit, but rather as a launch assist for chemical rockets. You would be amazed at the weight savings just by accelerating a rocket to 500MPH before using onboard fuel.
Also, another point missed by most is that while maglev has been around a while, one of the main problems has been power availablity. For an operational system, you will need 3-6 Megawatt's in 6 seconds. To solve that problem (they don't think they could get a large nuclear power plant just for this thing) they are thinking about using VERY large flywheels to slowly spin up and store the energy until launch.
And funding is next to nill. The army was kind enough to donate a few model airplains for the test rig. I used to have some MPEG's of this, if I find the URL, I'll post them.
For further perusing and some nice pics, try http://std.msfc.nasa.gov/ast/abstracts/0B_Cole.htm l
and http://std.msfc.nasa.gov/ast/index.html
John Cole Jr.
Slashdot Mirror
Dad emailed me his video of the Nasa maglev mentioned in the CNN article. It's in mpg format (6.35MB).
I've posted it here.
John Cole Jr.
My father is the John Cole quoted in the CNN article and it's his office that is managing the maglev (among a lot of much more interesting projects), so I am familiar with this particular project. No one at NASA want's to use maglev as the only method for putting anything into orbit, but rather as a launch assist for chemical rockets. You would be amazed at the weight savings just by accelerating a rocket to 500MPH before using onboard fuel. Also, another point missed by most is that while maglev has been around a while, one of the main problems has been power availablity. For an operational system, you will need 3-6 Megawatt's in 6 seconds. To solve that problem (they don't think they could get a large nuclear power plant just for this thing) they are thinking about using VERY large flywheels to slowly spin up and store the energy until launch. And funding is next to nill. The army was kind enough to donate a few model airplains for the test rig. I used to have some MPEG's of this, if I find the URL, I'll post them. For further perusing and some nice pics, try http://std.msfc.nasa.gov/ast/abstracts/0B_Cole.htm l
and http://std.msfc.nasa.gov/ast/index.html
John Cole Jr.