Imagine you’re going on a journey in the year 2050.
You arrive at the station, hand your over as you do in any airport today, show your boarding pass and are escorted aboard. Then just as now a good looking person will give you a safety briefing and instruct you to strap yourself in.
The difference is what happens next, as the vehicle you are in is on tracks and accelerates quickly away. It takes about 8 minutes to cover the 100 mile plane between the station and the sea, but as you don’t have a window you see all this on the monitor in front of you. You experience the acceleration much as you do at take-off today, but it lasts far longer.
Then the vehicle starts to climb and the slope becomes steeper and steeper until you are very nearly lying flat on your back and the vehicle reaches a speed measured in thousands of miles per hour.
And then you’re off the tracks and flying free, and all you can see on the monitor is blue sky.
If you’re a first time traveller your heart will be going like a steam hammer, but if you’ve been doing it for years you may be reading your pad or switching the monitor to rear view and seeing the track with the next shuttle ready to be launched, sea and the mountain all far below you through the clouds.
Then the length of thread hanging from the headrest in front of you loses its rigidity and curls back on itself so you know you’ve reached zero G and are through the earth’s atmosphere.
All this sounds like science fiction and it is, but it does go some way to answer the questions about how we are going to get more people into space. We will need to do this sooner or later because the massive amounts of valuable minerals in the asteroid belt and all that real estate on Mars.
So it may be your children who make the trip, your grandchildren or your great grandchildren, but it will happen sooner or later.
It is much easier to do than the space elevator which has been proposed by many, but considerably easier to construct.
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