Essentially the goal is this: to use a giant electromagnetic launch track to accelerate a hypersonic aircraft to Mach 1.6. The aircraft would then separate from the track, ignite its engine and enter near space at seven times the speed of sound.
Does no one read the article anymore before commenting? I'm not responding to all the comments here since it's clearly a waste of my time, but every single one of the concerns that people mention in this thread so far has been acknowledged in the article already.
This is completely different from what Branson is doing which is tourism for rich people. The proposal here is to launch large planes to the edge of atmosphere for rapid transportation.
@yogthos So not “launching hypersonic planes into space” then, but a horizontal catapult for feeble rockets.
Assume this is just to save an SST having to spend fuel getting up to low supersonic speed, and then it lands as a glider.
There are lots of designs for engines that work from stationary to hypersonic speed, which are air breathing, and have the advantage of being able to take off from runways.
@yogthos Sadly the article is behind a paywall, so I have to make some educated guesses. This idea has got multiple problems. First thing is that especially when you want to transport people (like said in the article), the g-load is really limited. This means that your rail gun would had to be incredibly long to speed up the plane to a significant speed. Remember that you need to travel at 25,000 km/h to stay in orbit.
But even when you sped up to such a speed, you would experience a ton of drag because of the air resistance. It is only feasible to really speed up in higher regions (> 70-80km). So you would need some kind of first stage that had to carry some kind of a second stage to that region, so that it could accelerate from there. But this is exactly the concept that is used by rockets like the Falcon9/Falcon Heavy or Rocket Labs Electron, who all perform a stage separation in that region and perform a RTLS or controlled splash down to recover the first stage.
Also you would had only a single possible orbit here. But in reality there are a bunch of different interesting orbits out there.
Then just think about the costs. Just calculate how much launches with systems like the F9 or the upcoming Neutron you would have to perform, to even reach the break even point.