Startram — Maglev Train To Low Earth Orbit

These "handheld gadgets" gave us Li-Ion batteries, which made all-electric cars practical... That's pretty damn huge.

If we had had a bigger push for EVs earlier, more advanced batteries would have been researched and developed earlier, rather than waiting for handheld gadgets to drive the market.

Frankly, vocal proponents of maglevs are also preventing us from just developing traditional high-speed rail, which France has shown to be imminently practical, and still very fast.

You've got to be kidding. France is a tiny country, about the size of a few east coast states; there simply isn't much distance between any two points there. HSR may be practical there, but it hasn't shown itself to be very practical here in the US, aside from the Northeast Corridor. Things are just too far apart; there's too many people wanting to travel between FL and NY, NY and LA, LA and WA, etc. Besides, how can HSR travel ever get anywhere very fast when you're only allowed to travel 35mph anywhere near any populated area thanks to morons that try to "beat the train" at crossings? I have serious doubts HSR could ever work here even in limited deployments, because of too many legal issues; you'd need to either elevate the train well above the ground, or bury it in tunnels; the first is probably impractical and the latter too expensive.

A space elevator definitely sounds like a great idea, but again it needs more funding to develop the required materials and engineering knowledge, because right now it's pretty much just on the drawing board. No one's made a cable with the required strength and deployed it in the field for anything, they've just talked about how to make it. There's no telling what kind of issues will arise when trying to develop this stuff at a large scale.

Source: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotScience/~3/a1wGGkoQh80/startram-maglev-train-to-low-earth-orbit

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