would carry a payload of some 10 kg of compacted lunar soil, rather like a cinder block. Over the first ten km of length each vehicle would be accelerated by magnetic pulses to a speed of 2400 m/sec, adequate for escape from the gravitational attraction of the moon. After acceleration each vehicle, its position and orientation continuously checked by laser interferometry, would receive corrective impulses over a kilometer of drift space. Finally, after its velocity and rotation errors were corrected to a high degree of precision, it would release its payload while in unaccelerated free flight. The payload would continue, slowing gradually as it climbed out of the moon's gravitational field, while the vehicle itself would be braked, turned, and recirculated to a stopping point and halted to pick up another payload. The parameters of a mass-driver of this kind appear quite attractive: an overall efficiency of more than 60%, and a throughput of up to a million tons per year, more than 100 times the weight of the mass driver itself. In order to obtain administrative direction of research on the mass-driver, it may be necessary to go outside of NASA and of the aerospace industry. However well qualified to direct research in the fields of aerodynamics, rocket propulsion and airframes, most administrators whose background is in aerospace lack the educational background to judge a technical pathway which is based on electromagnetic theory. Clearly there are a number of ways in which this administrative problem could be overcome, for
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