The title may sound crazy and far fetched, but what do some of you think of a type of 'inter-planetary high way'...or just to the moon or Mars? The idea came from that 'elevator' that has been proposed to be built by some form of chemical compounds?? Forgot the name but it was something like that...i guess the 'high way' would take a long time to build, but would it work? Could it be built on that same chemical compound that was proposed for the elevator to the ISS?
It could be a type of train track, or some device where the space craft can be hooked onto and then propelled away....ok it sounds crazy enough just a random thought.....

Isn't the moon like, you know, moving or something? And doesn't that pesky sun occasionally get between Earth and Mars? **shakes fist** darn you sun! you win this round!

Even if we could build one, I would imagine that when it comes to transportation between orbiting bodies it would take less energy to use our current technique than it would be to use a physical highway.

The reason being that with a transfer orbit you have an initial energy expenditure to get up to speed, but after that it's mostly just free fall. If you're following a ribbon you've introduced a lot more friction into the situation, which means that you'll need to constantly be using energy to keep moving.

Are you talking about a Space Elevator? Those could only be used for moving things between the Earth's surface and orbit.

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I have thought about this as well, but am unsure if what I was thinking would even work, but I will try and explain it anyway.

First you would need to setup a series of large Magnetic rings for say here to Mars. These rings would need to be quite large to accommodate a space craft designed to use them (No idea how big)

The rings should be able to direct the magnetic force so from one direction it would pull you through the ring and on the other side it would repel you. This should give you a nice acceleration. Also the rings should have the ability to slow you down as well.

The rings should be large enough to be able to contain rocket boosters to maintain position when the craft is being accelerated through and should also have some type of Ion drive with a Nuke reactor to be able to always align its self to the other rings and al to the orbits of the planets.

There should also be a set of rings within the orbit of each planet to boost the ship out of orbit and onto its destination. I suppose it would be kind of like a rail gun in a way

Now that the rings are built and in place you would need to build a craft to work with them. The craft would need to have magnetic plates built on it all around the craft and should have the ability to be either negative or positive at any given time.

The craft should only need to have enough propellant to do 3 things. Realign its self if necessary to aim with the rings, should have enough for orbital maneuvering and enough for an emergency burn. All three system should be able to feed off each other incase of an emergency.

Using this system would reduce the weight for fuel and increase the actual cargo capacity so that more supplies can be taken at one time instead of many smaller trips.

Now depending on the amount of travel you may need to build two sets of these rings. One for each direction.


Now someone that is good at math may be able to say what kind of speeds can be reached with this system and weather or not it would really help or not. I have really not done any research at all into it. I was just a thought I had one day.

Please feel free to poke as many holes in this as possible.

And further:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_e...to_outer_space

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Coil gun, not railgun. Common mistake.

The amount of precision you're talking about may not be possible. Probably, manuvering a spacecraft at solar-orbit speeds to pass through a ring would be as difficult or more so than matching orbits with a planet, not to mention the consequences of hitting the ring itself. That's assuming you can find a way to hold the rings precisely where they need to be without them going into orbit around the planets or the sun, as the case may be.

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Jeffrey, your idea falls into the general category of momentum energy banks. Usually, concepts are based on tethers:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_tether#Rotovators

Conceivably, you could have spinning tethers in orbit around various planets, essentially "throwing" spacecraft back and forth. Donald Kingsburry wrote a story ("The Moon Goddess and the Son") with an orbital coilgun design, though.

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For anything like this, the spacecraft being thrown around would need to be able to correct their course.

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By the way, here is another kind of "interplanetary highway." Be warned, though, it tends to be slow:

http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20050416/bob9.asp

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Hahaha yeah that sun, always out to get us

Thanks for the input people.
Yeah i was thinking of something like that too Jeffrey, some sort of magnetics.

Yes Swift, the space elevator, and those chemical compounds were in fact the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_Nanotubes

Easier way for an 'interplanetary highway' was thought up some years ago (help me out guys, getting old...)

You nudge an asteroid into an orbit that takes it from Earth to Mars regularly.
Then hollow out the asteroid into a huge permanently manned base.

Then all you have to do is rendezvous with the asteroid as it passes Earth and then depart when it gets near Mars. Reverse for the return.

So how about this. If these rings were say 2 large U shaped devices that were aligned together. This way they could be far enough apart to allow the ship to pass. All the different U devices on the highway would be connected VIA laser. Also the ship would have laser tracking along with radar, this allowing it to adjust is direction with plenty of time to get aligned with the gate.

Now the gates would have the ability to move and adjust as needed. All the really need to do is to move enough to get the ship going in the right direction. So if the orbiting body were to have moved 20 degrees from its original location at the time of the highway setup the rings would adjust for that.

Maybe that would not work and we would need to have a series of highways out there to be able to launch at any given time. Maybe the rings can start at an L point. So that would mean that we would need a tug of sorts to get the ship out of orbit. Probably a good idea to have a fleet of these anyway.

The question is can the U shaped devices still work in this matter or do the actually need to be one solid piece. I am still thinking that they will. But wanted to throw the other idea out there.

So with Radar and laser navigation and the ability for the rings to move and for the ship to maneuver, would this be more possible. If it is a solid ring, I would think that the inside diameter would be at a minimum of 5 times larger that the outside of the ship. Should allow for enough room. Don't we already do very precise navigation? We did land a probe on an asteroid softly without destroying it. That shows so ability to be quite accurate.

You don't need an asteroid, but that is often called a "cycler." For instance, here:

http://www.popularmechanics.com/scie...26.html?page=1

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Disclaimer: Avatar is not an official NASA image and does not imply any specific interplanetary or interstellar capability.

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Paul Birch has described a number of high-concept space megastructures, including orbital rings, which could conceivably be adapted to become interplanetary elevators. They rely on streams of mass particles controlled by magnetic fields, which (he says) could have spacecraft riding piggyback on the mass-stream.

However a Hoffman transfer orbit is so much easier to use than any orbital ring system for transfers between planets that I can't see any immediate demand for an interplanetary elevator. Perhaps in ten thousand years...

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