You may recall seeing videos and pictures of large howitzers in action — perhaps even the Big Bertha itself. But did you know of an endeavor called Project Babylon, whose ultimate goal was to launch payloads into space via cannon?
Like usual, Damn Interesting put together a thorough write-up of this lofty supergun and of its ill-fated creator, Gerald Bull.
And after a decade long hiatus, it turns out that this out-of-this-world mentality as applied to ballistics, is finally about to leave the drawing board. Enter the DD(X) Destroyer, a new naval ship being designed to use railguns as its modus operandi.
A couple months ago Popular Science published an article discussing how it works, in essence: projectiles weighing 40 pounds will be launched/shot at Mach 7 from a deck-mounted railgun, out of the atmosphere, re-enter and destroy a target with its kinetic energy alone. And if you are interested in other militaristic applications of this technology, Military.com has some additional information on its uses.
But you want to go to space, right?
Here is the problem, while most of your body could survive the launch, you would black out and die — very quickly (in short, because of the intense forces, your heart cannot pump the blood to your brain). You see, when the railgun launches the 40 pound projectiles into space, the projectiles are subjected to 45,000 G’s.
To put this into perspective, astronauts launched from the Space Shuttle undergo around 3 G’s.
Extreme roller coasters such as ‘Stealth‘ in England subject the passengers to nearly 5 G’s.
Pilots of the forgotten X-15 rocket plane would endure 10 G’s or more for brief amounts of time and only from one direction. However, as Michael Adams found out, at 15 they can become lethal.
Assuming you were shot in a straight line and were not spinning, at 20 G’s you would begin to bleed from the ears. And accelerating at 40 G’s, you would simply die. Game over. Feel free to try and be the exception to the rule though…
On another note, constructing a supergun along the lines of Project Babylon along an equatorial region could be a viable alternative for launching satellites and other inanimate payloads. Boeing does something similar with its Sea Launch program, albeit without fancy railguns or mile-long tubes.