From: higgins@fnala.fnal.gov (Bill Higgins-- Beam Jockey)
Newsgroups: sci.space
Subject: Mass driver/railgun literature (was Re: Transportation on the Moon.)
Date: 13 Oct 92 00:14:07 -0600
Organization: Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory
Distribution: usa
NNTP-Posting-Host: fnala.fnal.gov

In article <1992Oct9.174225.3103@uceng.UC.EDU>, rbatra@uceng.UC.EDU (Rajesh Batra) writes:
> We have been given a Senior Design Project based on a fictious
> premise that ice has been found at the North Pole of the Moon.  Our moon base
> (it's the year 2016, by the way) is located at the equator. Our Mission is
> to bring back this ice from the North Pole to our production facility plants
> (located at the equator as well) for extraction of Hydrogen and Oxygen. 
> [...] We have come up with several ideas including Pipelines, 
> Rockets, and Rail Guns. We are delivering about 2 tons of rock (containing ice)
> a day.
> 
> If anyone can direct me to abstracts that have been written concerning
> Rail Guns please do not hesitate to email me. 

[I e-mailed Rajesh, but it seems this might be of interest to others, too.]

Interesting design problem.  Offhand, it seems wrong to drag the ice
to the equator and do the processing there, but if that's your
assignment...

(Also, if you have the infrastructure to build a railgun launcher and
associated power supply, logistics, operations and maintenance stuff
at the poles, you can probably afford to build your chemical
engineering plant there instead!  Then you can ship anything you want
anywhere on the Moon or beyond, using the same H2-O2 rockets you use
to supply your base, refueling them at the Pole. Solar cells or
mirrors on a tall tower can give you power 28 days around the clock
there, too.)

Hope Cincinatti has some good engineering libraries;  if not, talk to
your librarian about the Magic of Interlibrary Loan.  And get a roll
or two of dimes for the photocopier.

Start with Arthur C. Clarke, "Electromagnetic Launching as a Major
Contribution to Spaceflight," *Journal of the British Interplanetary
Society*, v. 9 n. 6, November 1950, p. 261-267.  Unless you want to
start with an extremely obscure 1937 science fiction novel called
*Zero to Eighty* by Akkad Pseudoman, a pseudonym (Oh, no kidding.) for
E.F. Northrup.

Generally speaking, the best places to look for information are the
"Princeton Conferences,"  with titles like *Proceedings of the Nth
Conference on Space Manufacturing*, published by the AIAA.  

I have the title of only one of them explicitly: *Space Manufacturing
5: Engineering with Lunar and Asteroidal Materials*, edited by Barbara
Faughnan and Gregg Maryniak, AIAA (1985).

Also, every couple of years, there is a big conference on
electromagnetic launcher technology, and it appears in *IEEE
Transactions on Magnetics* as an extra-thick issue.  For instance,
IEEE T on M, V.27, No. 1, January 1991.

I have some specific early references (I met Henry Kolm in 1979 and he
sent me a bunch of papers).  

Kolm, H., "An electromagnetic `slingshot' for space propulsion,"
*Technology Review*, Jun 1977, p. 61-66.
Good semi-technical overview.

Kolm, H., Mongeau, P., "An alternative launching medium," *IEEE
Spectrum*, April 1982, p. 30-36.

A bunch of papers in the first two Princeton Conference on Space
Manufacturing (1977 and 1979) by Kolm, Kevin Fine, Peter Mongeau, and
Fred Williams.

Looking at my records, the Princeton conferences have so much stuff on
this it's not worth typing the titles individually.

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Newsgroups: sci.space