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Article #7531Re: Railgun in Southwest US
From: PETER YASUDA
Date: Mon, 11 Jan 1993 17:06
Date: Mon, 11 Jan 1993 17:06
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In article <C0HtJ3.Lqo.1@cs.cmu.edu>, ssi!lfa@uunet.UU.NET ("Louis F. Adornato") writes...
>uunet!eros.calpoly.edu!jgreen writes:
>> I've heard a rumor that some organization (SSI?) has actually
>> built a large railgun somewhere in the SW USA. It's apparently
>> supposed to be big enough to put small payloads (>5 kg) into
>> orbit, though I don't know if they've done that yet.
>>
>> Is this a rumor or is there some truth to it?
It's not a rail gun; it's some kind of gas gun. It's being built
by one of the Energy Dept labs. It uses a really big piston to
compress hydrogen gas which drives the projectile out the launch
tube, which is mounted at a right angle to the piston. Gas is
fed into the launch tube as the projectile passes by.
The first attempt will be a test with a light projectile. If
successful, the plan is to scale it up.
Sorry, that's all I recall. I don't even remember where the
article appeared.
pyy
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Path: arc1-ca.pugleaf.net!sparky!uunet!gossip.pyramid.com!olivea!spool.mu.edu!agate!ames!nsisrv!robots!peipyy From: peipyy@robots (PETER YASUDA) Newsgroups: sci.space Subject: Re: Railgun in Southwest US Summary: gas gun, not a rail gun Message-ID: <11JAN199312062182@robots> Date: 11 Jan 93 17:06:00 GMT References: <C0HtJ3.Lqo.1@cs.cmu.edu> Sender: usenet@nsisrv.gsfc.nasa.gov (Usenet) Distribution: sci Organization: Goddard Space Flight Center - Robotics Lab Lines: 22 News-Software: VAX/VMS VNEWS 1.4-b1 Nntp-Posting-Host: robots.gsfc.nasa.gov