Cheap Space travel

A disclaimer: There is a lot of real Science involved.

Imagine a world which is exactly a copy of Earth (at least in terms of power as a species and technology). There is a company that aims to make space travel extremely cheap so that Earth could actually import stuff from asteroids passing by (just to give you a financial estimate). For reasons of abstraction, a method of converting electrical energy directly into kinetic linear motion (unlike a motor, which is rotational) has already been discovered.

My question is about the feasibility of making a "spaceship" whose only operational cost is in energy (everything else is, like in real life, considerably cheaper). There are two facets to this problem that I could see:

1. Can we claim back most (in the order of 95%) of the energy of the ship that is falling back to Earth as part of Law of Conservation of Energy, assuming that Second Law of Thermodynamics (100% efficiency is not possible) still applies?

2. Even then, energy is lost through air resistance. Is there an theoretical substance which could be mass produced (it maybe be slightly expensive), could work in rough conditions and still provide zero (or near zero) air resistance regardless of speed of the spaceship? The shape of the ship till be as aerodynamic as possible.

This part may help, but it is not necessary to look into: It may be possible that the ship is fired from a spaceport using electricity and a falling ship could be caught by the spaceport to convert its kinetic energy into electricity using, say super-capacitors to store the energy (because they charge really fast).

posted over 6 years ago

Kavi Vaidya‭

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