ACCTOPE Sky Hook
It is time to introduce Atomic Chemical Counter-thrust Orbital Payload Elevator (ACCTOPE) or "Orion Lift" for short. Yes it is a “sky hook” application, except with “real” energy inputs and no hints of “perpetual motion” nonsense. In terms of the counterbalance or fulcrum, there is none needed as you can see from this sketch. The counter-thrust engines slow and stop the sky hook once the hook’s payload reaches weightlessness.
Perhaps it is more of a harbour tug than a crane or elevator. Nothing on earth I can think of provides an exact design parallel. Maybe it could be compared to a shunting locomotive with an engine at both ends of the railcars. Anyhow this takes Orion in a new direction because once you accept that “ground launch” is a political impossibility for various reasons, you have to consider designing your orbiting test apparatus or test bed. Fire a gunpowder rocket on earth and you can follow it in transport and pick it up for inspection. An Orion cannon fired in an orbit would, without adequately powerful counter-thrust engines, simply shoot out of the solar system and leave little evidence for analysis. If the challenge is physical containment, the cannon (or hollow tube and pusher plate) would need careful inspection each time for cracks and hairline fractures.
Thus the chemical counter-thrust engines would need to easily refuel able. In cost and labour terms, constructing the suggested 500 tonne orbiting titanium cannon is going to actually be cheaper than perhaps building the adjoining chemical counter-thrust engines. However a bright side is that even if the test bed apparatus fails in the end to achieve physical containment of a detonation (within the tube and pusher-plate alignment), the counter-thrust engines could be easily decoupled from the orbiting test apparatus and used after some refilling to provide propulsion for a conventional high speed Mars run. Take note because these counter-thrust engines will be very big.
Bear in mind the hundreds, if not thousands, of rocket launches such a program would require to construct the orbiting test apparatus. It must put into space not only the titanium cannon in many pieces, the counter-thrust engines in many pieces and the astronauts to build it but also huge quantities of propellant chemicals to refuel the counter-thrust engines for every test required. Hence as soon as success was achieved it would be vital to switch to a more efficient form of placing payload in space. This would immediately relax any political pressures due to fears and/or magnitudes of global warming as a result of the program. Switching to pull payloads through Orion “sky hooks” would hopefully phase out as soon as possible all traditional push payload rocketry. To give the climate a break for a while!
ACCTOPE Sky Hook continued
The great thing is that once you have in orbit the first working Orion sky hook, it can lift more than its own body weight with ease. Hence your first pull payloads are further sky hooks just in case there is a problem with the first. The new sky hooks would also potentially be of much greater quality and reliability, having had the advantage of being constructed on earth and in one piece (milled cannon?) Indeed in the meantime it might be wise for a government to build one and keep it in storage just in case a friendly alien race drops by and asks if there is anything they could do for us!
Every schoolboy knows China invented gunpowder but failed to develop the cannon. The space programme is flagging and failing to colonize into this frontier leaves the world leaderless. The development path from cannon to rifle shaped nations, so why again does an empire reject the engineering jump? America must revise the Orion project concepts made before Apollo, the obvious threat of disaster of straying from the natural evolutionary theory of non use, space propulsion, is an awful probability.
“The inventing society of any new and overwhelming explosive compound will fail to develop its most significant application because of an over-whelming sense of what dangers any physical containment will involve.”
Success in space would just be a mere extension of our hard won experience in developing firearms for over a thousand years. Except of course the desired product of this space firing tube is propulsion itself rather than to throw more efficient projectiles. Success in space would just be an elongation or this tradition. Except of course the product of that reliable firing tube is space propulsion rather than flinging balls around.